We’ve designed and built a custom web app to show at a glance Lucentt’s manufacturing successes and rejects. Faults during manufacturing are inevitable, however, business owner Bruce Reid wanted a visual, digital software that would visualise the faults occurring on a daily basis, with a view to be able to identify trends and provide insights on common mistakes made. With this insight, further training and systems improvements can be implemented.

“We cannot accept that we don’t know why an item was rejected,” says Matt Fridh, Production Manager at Lucentt. Ultimately, with operational insights, Lucentt believes that the rate of rejects generated in manufacturing can be reduced to a minimum.

Lucentt manufactures units in the thousands on a daily basis. The process requires exacting standards, care and attention to detail in order to produce a blemish-free end product. Lucentt have identified a baker’s dozen of potential faults that can occur during manufacturing that impact on the number of units entering production versus the number of products successfully made, packaged and shipped out to their customers around New Zealand.

“I just want a real simple visual display, like a speedo,” said Bruce.

Initially, together we researched various production softwares out there and came across literally hundreds of apps that were too advanced and yet too generic – and in the vast ocean of softwares available on the world wide web – too numerous to identify a “simple” solution to meet Bruce’s needs.

So the creative minds at Hart Design set about designing our own custom web app, built specifically for Lucentt’s needs.

Daily, in a spreadsheet, Lucentt records details of products manufactured, the number of occurrences of various faults, among other information. Saved as a CSV file, they upload the data into the custom web application, where our ingenious script takes over…

Our script:

• Imports the CSV data into a mySQL database – a fundamental building block for everything that happens thereafter;
• The numbers are crunched;
• Then the results are displayed as a series of graphs on a web page hosted on our web server, and available to Lucentt anywhere with an internet connection.

Lucentt casts the page to a large monitor on the shop floor so that the team can see and celebrate their successes, while users with direct access to the web app have the ability to drill deeper into the data to analyse trends, gain insight into potential causes and plan constructive responses to issues.

“For Version 1, this has been a home run,” says Production Manager, Matt Fridh.

Matt was routinely recording production stats in a spreadsheet already. The data was always there in a large, highly detailed spreadsheet, but until now there was no way to quickly visualise the successes and failures of their manufacturing operation. With the development of this custom web app, Lucentt can see at a glance whether they’re hitting or missing KPIs on the shop floor.

The insights provided very quickly uncovered two different trends where particular faults were recurring. The individual fault types were once thought to be exclusively caused by human error, however, investigations into the trends visualised by our web app ultimately led to two valuable discoveries.

With this new knowledge acquired, the team could adjust their production environment and in doing so they have virtually eliminated these once-common fault types. This has resulted in a practically immediate return on investment for this custom web software.

In the first trend, faulty items were speckled with dust, causing imperfections in the finish. In a workshop environment, some dust is to be expected, however, the visualised data revealed an unacceptably high recurrence of the issue. The initial assumption was that this spike in speckled units was caused by an unclean working environment, and improper application of the airbrush, designed to remove dust before finishing. A deeper investigation revealed that the dust was coming from the cardboard boxes in which the units were being stored prior to being finished. In contemporary plastics, often there is a portion of rubber in its composition to make the material more elastic. This has meant the plastic is more highly susceptible to static electricity, which was attracting the cardboard dust to the plastic units. The airbrush proved to be ineffective in removing the dust. The fix was simple and incurred virtually zero cost: wiping the units with a microfibre cloth before finishing has all but eliminated this fault type.

Secondly, Lucentt was puzzled by uneven colouring across particular batches. Rather than human error, in this investigation, Lucentt learned that the fault trend was in fact caused by a design flaw in the oven used to cure batches of product. The back of the oven was open at the top and bottom, causing uneven temperatures to impact colour consistency for certain colours. Again, the fix –altering the oven– was simple, cost effective, and provided a permanent solution to the problem of the once-high levels of colour inconsistencies.

Sometimes, rejecting a unit or batch of units is a subjective call. Sudden, unexpected spikes in rejects as visualised in the app can highlight if an inspector is being overly critical in their assessment of units. This insight allows managers to intervene, offering a second opinion on faults and providing further training to staff to improve the team’s quality control process.

Additionally, creating a minimalist, graph-based visualisation of successes v rejects can help incentivise Lucentt’s team to continually strive for better, as they can see at a glance the team’s overall success rate for any given day. While management is interested in the number of rejects generated each day, rather than labelling this as a “Reject Chart”, we have instead labelled this as a “Success Snapshot” so as to be a positive and encouraging influence for Lucentt’s workforce.

Matt states that “This app has meant more accountability and also some creative solutions on the shop floor that help prevent faults before units get pushed through the entire production process.” Once focussed on production volume, the app has “helped staff to understand what’s truly important: quality over quantity,” continues Matt.