Efficiency as a service

Opticloud originates as a tool to improve efficiency and productivity on machines. This is still our core but our vision has expanded to that we want to benefit society by enabling competitive and sustainable local production industries.

The tool is called Opticloud, but in reality, it’s a service and a partnership where we help build the right tools for your journey to production excellence.

We deliver this service in several different modules that are all relieving individual pains and serving individual purposes, but with the same goal for all of them; to help optimize your production and benefit society.

Efficiency of both automatic and manual processes

Opticloud has the functionality to collect data from both manual and automatic processes.

The automatic process is typically any form of machine or industrial process where we can collect or create a runtime signal and/or a value from a machine, system, or process and receive the data automatically.

The manual process is a process where humans are doing work by hand, for example, mounting, packaging, logistics, assembly, sanding, drilling, and operating any form of the process where it is not possible to collect data automatically. But the Opticloud operator panel has as an option, a user interface, where the operator themselves can register start/stop times, number of units, etc. This functionality is used as digital time and job card registration for processes the companies did not have any data on before. At the same time, it enables the operators to use all functionality around digital logbooks and waste registration.

Calculating your OEE

One of the primary modules of the platform is our OEE module. OEE, which means Overall Equipment Effectiveness, is one of the key performances indicators (KPI). The underlying calculations for your OEE measurement consist of the following modules:

Measurering your availability

The availability module is most likely the most used module on our platform. It is also the most visible pain to customers. The most frequently asked questions many of our customers seek an answer to are: What is my average uptime for my machines? How long are my stops usually? How long is there between stops? How many stops do I have throughout my shift/day?

The availability module seeks to answer these questions. You get timestamps for each time your machine is running and each time it’s stopped and on top of that, we calculate a percentage for you.

Planning your shifts

To calculate the actual availability of your machine, we need to know the planned production time. The planned production time usually follows your operators’ work schedule or shifts.

To support this, we have a shift planning module, where you type in all your planned shifts throughout a week. You can add multiple shifts per day, let’s say you might have a morning, day, and night shift. You can add that and customize it however you want.

For holidays, maintenance, etc. where you do not have your normal production shift, we have a shift calendar functionality. In this functionality, you can plan out and template all your dates and weeks which have changed from your normal shift plan. This means you can actually plan your production a year ahead of time.

The shift planning is important because this is where you tell us your planned production time, which will be 100% of your availability if you actually produce all of that time. The reality is most likely something different. You’ll have operators waiting for material, machine breakdowns, etc. These are the unplanned stops, which will lower your availability percent.

Analyzing your performance

The performance module is the second most important thing in the OEE module. Above I explained the availability module, but that module doesn’t say anything about the actual production when the machine is running. It just indicates how long it has been running. But how fast where your production while your machine is running?

Your performance, also what is mostly referred to as effectiveness, is your machine’s tact time versus produced units, when your machine is running. A real-world practical example of this is:

Imagine you have a conveyor belt, on this conveyor you have bottles, in the middle of the conveyor the bottles are stamped with a sticker. The conveyor and sticker robot has a maximum speed. The maximum speed is your 100% performance target, which could be 60 bottles a minute.

When the conveyor and robot are running, your goal is to put stickers on 60 bottles a minute and you assume that this should be the case. But at the end of the conveyor, you have a packaging robot, which can only package 30 bottles a minute, because the packaging robot might be dependent on several other variables, like truck drivers, operators, etc.

This will make your performance percentage 50% even though the conveyor and sticker robot are running just fine, with 100% availability.

Getting your units information and order numbers

The module can also handle multiple production scenarios, like different orders or unit types, where they all have individual tact times or expected speeds.

The module will take the order number currently being produced either from direct operator input, scanners, machine PLC or through ERP/MES/SCADA integration.

We most commonly get order/unit information from systems like MS Dynamics 365.

The integration works in real-time, so if you send an order number to a machine and at the same time send the same order to Opticloud, the timestamps will match and the order will change in real-time on the operator panel.

Reporting your quality

I’ll continue the above example into quality. Our quality module will count scrap, so of the units, you produce how many are actually quality proofed to be sold.

After the packaging robot, you might have quality inspectors who’ll look at the placement of the stickers. Let’s say they determine that 6 out of the 60 bottles coming through have stickers placed wrong. This means you have a quality percent of 90% because 10% of your bottles will be scrapped.

You can either input scrap directly as an operator through our operator panels or we can send it directly from a machine PLC. Another alternative is if you have another system for the quality we can integrate it into that system to get the data or vice versa.

All of the above modules are visible through our Operator Panel, online Business Intelligence reporting tool, and API for custom reporting purposes.

The why? Report your stops

In Opticloud we have what we call our waste engine. Our waste engine handles all the why’s in the system. The answer to why is my machine or manual process is stopped? But also questions like:

• How many stops do I have?
• How many setups do I have?
• How long time do I spend on planned/unplanned maintainence?
• How many hours did the operator spend cleaning the conveyor?
• Do we spend too much time on lunch breaks?
• Are we waiting too long on materials?

And many more…

We report stops to the engine in two ways. One is by human input through our operator panel. The screen will simply prompt the operator, asking him/her to choose why the machine is stopped when we get a stop signal from the machine. This stop signal can also be triggered on a delay/timer, so the operator should only report on serious/critical stops.

The second way is to get stop reasons directly from the machine or PLC (the computer in the machine). Often the machine already has a signal for certain breakdowns or errors occurring in motors, conveyors, or other systems in the machine. These signals can be sent directly into Opticloud so the operator won’t have to touch a thing.

The two ways can also be combined, so if you have a stop that the machine already knows the reason for, it’ll send that directly and does not prompt the operator. If it doesn’t know the reason it’ll ask the operator to choose a reason why.

This is true cooperation between man and machine where you get the most relevant from both worlds.