From Lean to Green Manufacturing

“Lean produces an operational and cultural environment that is highly conducive to waste minimization and pollution prevention”  Lean Manufacturing and the environment: United States Environmental Protection Agency, study EPA100-R-03-005

“RFID technology is viewed as a vehicle to achieve leaner manufacturing through automated data collection, assurance of data dependencies, and improvements in production and inventory visibility.”RFID opportunity analysis for leaner manufacturing: International Journal of Production, issue 9, 2010

Nexess provides IIOT solutions dedicated to lean Manufacturing for industrials worried to increase their performance in terms of productivity, quality, safety, by reducing at the same time their environmental impact. Nexess solutions provide real time asset traceability, identification, geolocation and inventory for manufacturing, supply chain, maintenance and operations.

Lean Manufacturing: Nexess Smart Solutions participate to reduce different types of wastes

Lean manufacturing focuses very heavily on identifying and minimizing any activities that do not add value to the final product. It also refers to using less of anything that is involved in the production process – less labor, less inventory and less space and so on. An important aspect of lean manufacturing is managing product flow through the manufacturing process. Each step of the process produces its product in response to a ‘pull’ demand of the next process in the chain. As a result, there is no accumulation of excess inventory, fewer overtime hours, less scrap and discarded material.

Nexess Smart solutions participate to reduce different types of wastes:

• Needless transportation / movement: poor planning of storage and shipment will lead to needless movement.
  Nexess Smart solutions allows managers to track the manufacturing process more closely by increasing visibility. This reduces lead times and improves visibility into the manufacturing process. Materials provided from the vendor can be directly delivered to the assembly line ready for use
• Needless inventory: storing unnecessarily large quantities of inventory ties up space, money and handling resources.
  Nexess Smart solutions help optimize the inventory being held by a business by providing real time insights into goods being manufactured or in storage, tracking discarded items and reducing the safety stock being held.
• Overproduction: making more or faster or earlier than the next process actually requires.
  Nexess smart solutions lead to improved visibility into raw material states, better tracking of manufacturing processes and improved forecasting capabilities.
• Defects – these add to waste due to additional inspections, handling costs, repairs and the time lost in making the product in the first place.
  Nexess Smart Solution permit complete traceability of the goods under production lead to measurable improvements in quality. Equipment history is tracked more accurately, leading to higher serviceability rates and improved management.
• Wait periods / Wasted manpower : workers or machines waiting idly for the output of the previous process to arrive. (poor workfow planning, poor hiring and training, high turnover etc) . With Nexess Smart solutions, there is considerable improvement in the information collection and analysis – process being accurately known helps in the reduction of wasted time and effort and in decision making.

Lean and green manufacturing concept is one of the best recent trends in operation management. Operations management has long been focused on waste reduction, so modern management programs like Lean Manufacturing represent today’s best practices in operation management and these efforts can yield large environmental benefits.

Safety: Nexess Smart Solutions to prevent industrial accident

Serious technological accidents happen every day somewhere in the world, causing deaths, injuries and damage to the environment. In industry, as in other activities, specialists assure us that zero risk will never be attained. It is therefore up to governments and industry to reduce the probability of accidents occurring to a level which is acceptable to society.

Hazardous materials tracking Hazardous materials comprise explosives, flammables, oxidizing substances, poisonous gases, and radioactive materials. By definition, they can be extremely harmful to the environment and to human’s health, since exposure to their toxic ingredients may cause injury or even death. Their effects are an apparently inevitable consequence of the industrial processes dictated by the life style of our modern society. It follows that transporting these materials, often in populated or environmentally sensitive areas, is also inevitable. Nexess smart solution modernize the current practice of management of hazardous materials to enhance safety, worker protection and environment. Nexess Smart Solutions are deployed on nuclear plants to track and monitor containers containing nuclear and radioactive materials.

Nexess FOD Killer Solution In the Aeronautics and Aerospace sectors, the FOD or “Foreign Object Damage”, which is the risk of the presence of a foreign body, represents a high risk of accident. The FOD includes all equipment, tools, materials and other items that may interfere with the proper operation of airplanes or mechanical control. The damage can be minor or major and often costly. Indeed, the repair costs can easily exceed 20% of the original price of the damaged portion. The “National Aerospace FOD prevention” estimates the cost of FOD for all the Aeronautical and Aerospatial industry at 4 billion dollars a year. An important cost that can be greatly reduced through the use of RFID technology. Nexess solutions for tool tracking on assembly lines and MRO workshop have demonstrated their usefulness in the reduction of the risk of FOD damage and thus its environmental impact.