Manufacturing

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In the fast-paced manufacturing industry, companies seek wireless LANs and durable scanning technology for a variety of shop-wide applications. Large manufacturers like Alcoa, Boeing, Ford, and others have already rolled out wireless LANs in their manufacturing facilities.

But in many cases, manufacturers know that the staff of a certain area or division isn't performing as well as they might. While they know they have a problem, they just don't know the solution. "Customers don't necessarily come to us and say they need wireless," said Dave Worton, CEO of Made2Manage Systems, a company that ships its own mobile, wireless access solution, Mobile Manager. Instead, what they say is that they are "frustrated in getting access to production and inventory schedules."

In the past, the shop floor lacked good mobile computing devices—rugged and robust devices with Windows CE or Palm operating system (OS) capabilities. The products offered by vendors didn't excite anyone. They were big, clunky devices that, although they worked well enough, were not always suitable for factory shop employees to lug around all day. There were also issues concerning standards, awareness, and a fear of change. All served to cause a lack of interest in wireless LAN technology in the factory.

That's all changed. The excitement and media attention over all things Wi-Fi serves to drive interest in wireless technology, even in the manufacturing sector. Vendors like Symbol and LXE offer some pretty nifty, rugged mobile computing devices, designed specifically for use in the rough and tumble manufacturing world, and the 802.11 series of standards have addressed many other concerns that the industry had about wireless.

Another driver for the adoption of wireless LANs is good quality software. Vendors such as Oracle and SAP now cater to manufacturing applications on a mobile basis, creating applications that once could run only on stationary workstations.

However, any manufacturer, large or small, who is considering going wireless, should know that there are a few important issues to consider first. One is signal blockage. Another is interference. These and any other special circumstances within your specific plant facilities should be considered very carefully when planning a WLAN deployment.

Pay strict attention to the planning process, especially concerning placement of the access points, because as John Williams, data product specialist for Avaya Canada so aptly puts it, "the wireless spectrum doesn't go through stuff very well." And there's a lot of "stuff" in manufacturing facilities: ceilings, floors, walls, raw materials, products, and machinery.

Williams gives as an example a rolled paper plant in Nova Scotia that faced a difficult challenge implementing wireless. A big roll of paper is one of the worst interference agents because there's water in it and it's solid wood. One big roll of newsprint can stop RF signals dead in their tracks. And since these paper rolls were constantly being moved around the plant, interference was dynamic, not static. Thus, the company's WLAN had to be designed so that no matter where the rolls were dropped, the radio signals still could get through.

Whether a wireless LAN is right for your plant will depend on a number of factors, and each facility will have its own peculiarities. A consultant, integrator or wireless vendor can help sort through everything to ensure that the WLAN deployment and subsequent operation goes smoothly.

In the meantime, the software and hardware are improving and the opportunities to cut costs continue to mount. The benefits aren't going away any time soon.

Die castings manufacturer Meridian-Jutras operates out of a 50,000-square-foot facility. Every time Robert Bolton, the company's automation supervisor, wanted to hook up a programmable logic controller (PLC) to the company's wired network, or move machinery (which was happening regularly), Bolton was forced to figure out a way of relocating the cable. He also had to call in contractors to run Category 5 cabling, make sure it was properly shielded, and possibly put it in conduit. That was until the manufacturer went wireless.

Here's some sage advice from Bolton concerning the deployment of a wireless solution. "Like everything in manufacturing, it should be driven by cost, but I just knew it was technology I wanted to get in [the plant]. I saw a use for it in all departments. Don't let the upfront costs sway you against moving forward."

Bolton also says that although it's tough to cost everything out up front when payback might be a year down the road, after his wireless network was up and running, he was very pleased with the choice.

Case Studies

Dingley Press

Located in south-central Maine, Dingley Press is a large printer of mail-order catalogs. The company, which operates around the clock, mails around one million ink-jet-addressed catalogs every day, making it the second-largest "post office" in Maine.

The assembly of the catalogs is a complex operation. Pages, which are printed in groups called "signatures," are loaded onto pallets to await assembly. This means that literally hundreds of these pallets are stacked four-deep throughout the warehouse. The catalogs, which range from 32 to 128 pages, are assembled from the center outward, starting with the order form, which is stapled in the middle.

Customers frequently request multiple versions of a catalog, which complicate matters even more. A clothing catalog customer, for example, might want its winter catalog to sport two covers, one for mailing to people in the warmer climates and another for people in the northern, colder locales. The catalog destined for southern regions might also have extra pages of clothing for wearing in more temperate weather conditions. The company is oft-times required to assemble as many as two dozen different "signatures" for the same catalog, and all versions must be printed and bound for simultaneous mailing to get the best postal rates.

Accuracy and completeness of such complex inventory is critical. Tracking every pallet within the 350 x 450-foot building—as well as those located in off-site warehouses—and locating the right pallet, especially in an emergency (and there are emergencies), can be a nightmare. With as many as six companies' catalogs in production at any one time, "losing" a pallet or bringing the wrong one to the bindery can be expensive. So expensive that Dingley assigned two people to the full-time task of managing the stock.

Working together, the company's Information Systems and Warehouse departments devised a better solution—one based on their own in-house application and Cisco Aironet wireless technology. The Cisco and Dingley team originally connected Hitachi handheld Microsoft Windows CE touch-screen tablets to barcode readers that could decipher the tags identifying each printed pallet load. But, after several months of operation, Dingley replaced the handheld Hitachi units with forklift-mounted Intermec mobile terminals, because Intermec's rugged keyboard was better suited to the rigors of an industrial environment than the touch-screen tablets.

When a forklift driver takes a pallet to its warehouse location, he or she uses a scanner to identify the load, and then keys the section and row in which the pallet is placed onto the mobile terminal. The terminals are connected wirelessly via a Cisco Aironet 340 Series PC card client adapter to the server. Thus, when the driver inputs the location information onto the terminal and presses "transmit," the information is sent to the server via Cisco Aironet 340 Series Access Points mounted throughout the facility.

"If it's a new load, it's added to the inventory. If it's just being repositioned, the system updates the location. If the pallet is being taken to the stitcher for assembly, it's recorded as consumed. So we always have a running account of produced, consumed, and in-stock inventory," said Mike Martell, systems manager and principal developer of the customized application. "Also, we can strategically position specific pallets for quick access, which means there's no time lost searching for them because the wireless system has enabled us to maintain an accurate, readily available location of inventory."

Having accurate locations helps solve printing problems, too. If a color or alignment problem is spotted at the start of a printing run, it is likely that the problem actually began near the end of the previous load. Dingley personnel can quickly check and find how far back the error went, so they can quickly determine how many extras they need to print to catch up.

But an up-to-the-minute inventory of every pallet's location and status is just one benefit derived from the wireless system. Martell says, "customers sometimes call and say they need 25,000 of a particular book to carry to a trade show. Do we have sufficient stock? We can look up the combination of signatures and determine the highest number on hand of least-available components, which allows us to calculate how many full catalogs we can provide them. If we didn't have real-time inventories, we couldn't provide this service."

Five forklifts are equipped with Cisco Aironet wireless technology. Although the original forklift-mounted units were fitted with Cisco Aironet 340 Series PC Card client adapters, providing 11 Mbps of bandwidth, the new Intermec units use internal 802.11b adapters to connect with the WLAN. Four Cisco Aironet 4800 access points, each with a 5 dBi antenna, are mounted in the warehouse. "We could have managed with just two access points, but four ensure that no posts or machinery or high towers of stock will interrupt transmission, and they give us a measure of redundancy," said Martell. (Dingley is considering a similar setup for an external warehouse.)

Dingley selected Cisco Aironet products for numerous reasons. "Recognition of Aironet's support, capacity, and reputation for reliability was key. Aironet had a reputation for working properly," says Martell. Cisco Aironet also offered drivers for Windows CE (Dingley's primary platform), while many other companies did not.

"To put it succinctly, no one else had a wireless data collection system that provided ease of use, the ability to be mounted on forklifts, and customizability to suit our needs. The Cisco Aironet package solved a significant business problem for us," Martell explains.

In the near future, the wireless network will reach into the printer's manufacturing arena. If a pallet is not used completely, an operator can identify how many pieces are left over and create a return-to-stock tag. Martin says, "Rather than dropping Ethernet connections all across the manufacturing floor to reach the machine used to print these tags, we will use Cisco Aironet wireless connections, and they can create return-to-stock tags free of the restrictions of a cabled environment."

The Dingley tech support team uses handheld computers and the wireless network as they move around the campus on maintenance checks, accessing web-based controls for print servers, for the wireless access points, or any other remotely managed device. "If I have a printer not working properly somewhere, I can access the web-based management system to test the print server," Martell says.

A number of laptops are also equipped for wireless operation. The vice president of finance and the comptroller use their 802.11b-enabled laptops in board meetings and in strategy discussions, where they can always access key figures instantly. To maintain the complex parts inventory, the Purchasing Department takes a wireless-equipped laptop to the parts cages to conduct inventory reconciliation online. They have found this faster and more accurate than writing everything down and returning to their desks to transcribe the data.

For sales representatives, consultants, and others who require network or Internet access, Martell can deploy a laptop with a Cisco Aironet PC card client adapter. This capability is also available for customers who visit Dingley to conduct quality checks on catalogs.

While the inventory system remains under development to improve its reliability, accuracy, and applicability to the companies' needs, the wireless component has become a solid, reliable part of the processing. According to Martin, by helping Dingley to prevent mistakes, to locate stock in substantially less time than by manual searching, and to maintain accurate inventory, the Cisco Aironet system has already paid for itself several times over. "It's reliable, flexible and secure."

Libbey-Owens-Ford

Libbey-Owens-Ford (LOF), with headquarters in Toledo, Ohio, is the second largest North American glass manufacturer. It supplies glass products for the transportation, architectural, and specialty markets. It has over 200 sites and approximately 7000 employees.

Over the past decade, LOF has sought to reduce cost and inventory levels, and increase productivity—every corporate executive's dream. The company decided the way to increase productivity was by giving more detailed information on products and inventory levels to floor personnel, so that they could make better business decisions.

The manufacturer's executives decided wireless networking might be the solution. After doing a fair amount of research, the company settled on 802.11b wireless networking, using Symbol's Spectrum24 wireless Local Area Network and LRT 3840 handheld computers.

Before going forward with the wireless project, Libbey-Owens-Ford faced myriad ongoing challenges. Inventory reporting was always behind by 24 hours, with tickets entered manually and handed in the next morning. "Inventory can only be as accurate as paperwork turned in," says Jeff Hobbs, the company's lead programmer/analyst. "It is only as accurate as the person entering the data."

In addition, performance reporting also ran at least a day behind. "We need to know how we are doing in real time," says Hobbs. On the plant floor, company personnel needed to know inventory levels. Scheduling needed correct inventories. Schedulers were delayed until reports were printed, which increased the possibility of missed shipments. LOF lacked personnel to enter data. It looked for cost reduction and elimination of unnecessary steps in the inventory process. "Inventory levels were kept at summary levels only," says Hobbs. "Turning of inventory was hard to control."

The manufacturer wanted the WLAN to standardize all of its plant processes, and to print customer-specific tickets at shipment time.

Enter Symbol Technologies, which first partnered with LOF ten years previously to supply the manufacturer with barcoding equipment and its original wireless LAN system, the Symbol Spectrum One network. "Symbol was there with the right equipment at the right time," says Hobbs. "The equipment has very good uptime even with rough handling. We have also had very good support from Symbol. The products have saved us time and money in tracking our inventory with more accuracy."

Once everything was laid out and everyone knew what was expected from the new WLAN system, LOF installed Symbol's Spectrum24 with LRT 3840 computers in a client/server Unix environment at two sites. The Spectrum 24 system complies with the 802.11b standard, provides wireless connection to an Ethernet LAN through multiple, SNMP-compatible access points. The system features one-piece PCMCIA and ISA bus cards, which can be installed quickly in terminals, laptops, and other devices for easy connection to the wireless LAN. Spectrum24 also runs seamlessly with the company's IBM RS/6000 system and IBM MVS mainframe. "Spectrum24 offers us open connectivity, fast communications, and fast installation, since Ethernet is already installed at most of our locations," notes Hobbs.

Over the years, the benefits of using Symbol's products in a manufacturing environment have become clear to LOF. These include reduced data entry errors, lower inventories by more control, increased performance on manufacturing lines, timely reporting, inventories kept in real-time, detailed inventory ticket by ticket, inventory turn around on a first-in-first-out basis, and a better understanding of the manufacturing flow process by personnel. "Personnel have a direct impact on our bottom line, including loss reporting; and downtime reporting," states Hobbs.

The Spectrum24 network is used for a variety of manufacturing applications, including LOF's physical and cycle inventories. The company has 20 Symbol LRT 3840 devices, 35 LL500 wedges, and LS 4000 scanners. In fact, the manufacturer uses Symbol products in a number of applications, including shop floor reporting systems, ticket verification during shipping, physical and cycle inventories, production reporting, and rack tracking. Eventually, the company plans on rolling out the Spectrum 24 system to all of its manufacturing plants.

Currently, LOF inventory, raw through finished goods, is stored with a unique ticket on each rack, box, or container. When the physical inventory is in progress, every ticket in the plant is scanned wall-to-wall, using Symbol series 3840 scanners. If a ticket is not found, the operator is asked to scan the part number and verify the data that is returned. If the operator agrees with the data, then the ticket is flagged, "to be added to inventory." Reports are generated that list tickets to be removed from or added to the inventory. "These reports are itemized in dollar amounts, so that the impact is readily apparent," says Hobbs. "All of our Symbol investments have paid back in a year or less." The big payback is more accurate inventory levels as well as less time spent doing physical inventories.

While LOF's executives are pleased with the Spectrum 24 system, there have been a few bumps in the road. "Training is our biggest area of challenge," admits Hobbs. "You are training people from all walks of life to walk into the StarWars arena. The best part is when someone is scared of the technology and ends up loving it... What else could we ask for?"

MW Manufacturers

This $200 million maker of windows saved $5000 on cabling costs alone by implementing a wireless LAN in one of its manufacturing plants, asserts Eric Martin, the company's corporate director of IS and business systems. And, according to Martin, the WLAN enables MW to save money every time the production floor changes, which happens an average of three times a year, because the network doesn't have to be rewired.

"We used to have wiring closets set up all over the shop floor so we could run a wire to a PC," he says. "Then a few weeks later, we'd do it again."

MW Manufacturers deployed a WLAN using Enterasys' RoamAbout technology to meet the changing demands of its manufacturing facilities. It also availed itself of the expertise of Classic Networking, a Pennsylvania-based network solutions provider for on-site installation, at both MW Manufacturers sites in Rocky Mount, Virginia, and Hammonton, New Jersey.

Cultivating a culture of continuous improvement, MW Manufacturers frequently implements new procedures. These improvements often result in the movement of heavy machinery and equipment. Wireless networking, however, allows MW Manufacturers to reduce costs and provide flexible, secure, high-availability access to information in an environment of continuous change.

"For Information Services, changes to the facility layout and configuration were a nightmare, as well as costly. While other groups in the company could change manufacturing processes on a daily basis if needed, IS was seen as a roadblock," says Martin. "We needed a technology that would allow our employees to make changes in their various departments at will, without worrying about their network connectivity—Enterasys' RoamAbout allows us to do this."

Utilizing RoamAbout wireless LANs at its various facilities provides MW Manufacturers with seamless connectivity to support a dynamic environment. In Rocky Mount, the RoamAbout outdoor solution provides building-to-building wireless connectivity throughout their campus, delivering "anytime, anywhere" access to shipping and receiving information. In Hammonton, the RoamAbout network covers 365,000 square feet and connects "end-of-line" desktop computers, barcode scanners, and file servers to follow the product from the production line to shipping. Remote time clocks and desktop computers in the shipping department are also connected via wireless.

In addition to the RoamAbout wireless products, MW Manufacturers is also implementing Enterasys' Matrix E5 modular switches and Vertical Horizon standalone switches to provide high-density, 10/100 Fast Ethernet to desktop users. The company is deploying Matrix E6 switches for high-performance Gigabit Ethernet across the network backbone. The entire network is managed and monitored by Enterasys' NetSight Atlas network management software, providing an easy-to-use, graphical user interface to complement the advanced network management application.

"Enterasys is dedicated to developing networking solutions that truly serve the business needs of our clients," says Mads Lillelund, executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Enterasys Networks. "Coupling RoamAbout wireless connectivity with Enterasys' switching technologies and enterprise network management software enables a communications infrastructure capable of delivering the performance, availability and flexibility MW Manufacturers requires,"

Despite clear advantages, wireless LAN transmissions can be troublesome. Building construction obstructs signals, and 802.11b transmissions pick up interference from competing devices on the same public frequency. Major culprits are electromagnetic interference from production equipment and any steel structure that can insulate the signal. Martin used signal monitoring software provided by Enterasys to determine that ten access points could provide complete wireless coverage for the company's 360,000-square-foot factory. He situated the APs near high-traffic areas because, Martin explains, the further a user gets from an access point, the slower the access speed.

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