Future MRO

At Sony’s optical disc factory in Terre Haute, Indiana, they make magic two million times a day. Meet the people who keep it all running.

by Tom Hammel

Terre Haute, Ind. — It’s kind of like visiting an electronic Wonka-land. Inside neat but not especially noticeable buildings astride a city street in Terre Haute, Indiana is one of the coolest, most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world. Terre Hauteians drive past every day, completely unaware of the wonders going on inside.

And, like the grand but secretive Willy Wonka, this is just the way Sony likes it. There are secrets in here, marvelous ones, for on any given day, these twin plants create, package and ship more than two million Compact Discs, Digital Video Discs, Play Station games, Universal Media Discs and related optical disc products to every state and up to 100 countries.

That’s serious eye candy. And even more miraculous things are yet to come.

Life on technology’s edge
Since 1983, Sony’s Terre Haute staff has been on the front line not just of new technologies but also of developing in-house methods of maintaining and improving the machines that produce the products of those technologies. One might think keeping such advanced machines running would be relatively simple: consult the manual, do a little PM every now and then, and sit back and watch.

But two often overlooked factors are at work here: state-of-the-art machines don’t stay that way, and, the hazard of truly bleeding edge equipment is that you might be the first person who’s ever had to fix it. More often than not, Sony engineers and technicians must go where no one has gone before.

“We are usually the only ones in the United States that have this equipment and usually the second or third location worldwide to have it, based on who gets it first, Sony Austria, Sony Japan or us,” observes Vanessa Schafer, director, quality assurance, industrial engineering and Six Sigma for Sony DADC (Digital Audio Disc Corporation) in Terre Haute. “So we often find problems ourselves and then find ways to correct them because there’s nobody else to go to. It has to be fixed here or it doesn’t get fixed. Being first to market has advantages, but it has disadvantages, too.”

More and less
With 71 DVD replication lines, 23 CD lines, 25 UMD lines, 33 printing machines and a host of robotically controlled machinery, keeping everything running takes all the ingenuity and skill of some 120 maintenance technicians and a full phalanx of engineers, planners and Six Sigma experts to help and guide them.

And, as usual, doing more with less is often the order of the day. This takes three forms; extending the life of existing equipment, repurposing equipment to perform new functions (and thus avoid new equipment costs), and tweaking new equipment to increase its productivity.

Printing equipment in the plant provides a perfect example of this triple initiative.

“We needed to increase printing production,“ Schafer explains. “So we took older printing machines that were running 75 pieces a minute and moved them up to 90. To do this we had to improve handling and other factors. We were also getting in new high-speed equipment, but we discovered it had handling and ink problems. Working with our ink vendors, we developed new inks which helped us increase those machines from 100,000 to 140,000 pieces per day.”

Sony was also being forced to turn away screen printing business because all of its printers were offset machines. Through a Six Sigma project that analyzed how the printing machines worked, engineers devised a way to adapt existing offset machines to do two-color screen printing.

The capital savings from not having to buy a screen printer was roughly $750,000, and Sony can now easily accommodate those clients when they call.

“So some of those requirements to adapt equipment come from customer needs,” she adds. “We look at the equipment we have and at what we can do to utilize it to meet those demands.”

Many equipment repurposing projects originate internally as engineering solutions to annual capital budget planning and production forecasts. Capacity planning for the next fiscal year is done for each product line. The engineering staff reviews these forecasts to determine where their efforts will have to focus; to expand capacity of existing equipment, to save money or cut cost per unit produced.

“Whatever that initiative is for the year, we look at what we can do with what we have right now to meet those demands instead of making capital investments,” Schafer says.

For example, a molding machine making 500 pieces an hour might be modified to produce 800 per hour, thus eliminating the need to buy additional new machines.

In some cases, equipment is improved to the point where it has excess capacity. In one incidence, printing machines used for DVDs have reached a level of capacity where two of them are no longer needed. These are being pulled from DVD production to serve the new Blu-ray lines, at a capital savings of more than $2 million.

Next-gen upgrades
As they modify existing equipment to increase performance and improve reliability, the Terre Haute staff reports its findings to Sony Japan, which incorporates those refinements into new generation machines, not just for use in Terre Haute, but also for Sony replication facilities all over the world. As such, Sony Japan has made this input one of its expectations of the Terre Haute team. That the home office asks for such input and uses it pays documented dividends in Terra Haute.

“Our UMD (Universal Media Disc) equipment is very similar to DVD, just smaller,” Schafer explains. “We took all our ideas from the DVD equipment and gave them to Japan and had them build those improvements into the UMD equipment. We did the same on the DVD equipment. We’re on our fourth generation of DVD equipment now and with each generation we have given Japan ideas on how to make improvements and correct problems so we won’t have to face them anymore. Now the 2005 equipment we put in last summer very rarely has to be touched — it just runs.”

Robot wranglers
With a production capacity of up to 2.5 million units a day, quickly and accurately moving and managing inventory is critical. Todd Smiley, manager, material handling automation engineering, makes sure all the material handling systems are in synch, including the plant’s fleet of 38 Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs).

These automated roving carts collect totes of product from disc replication machines, and take the discs to any one of a series of APBs (Automated Process Buffers) where they are stored temporarily to buffer the WIP between processes. The Terre Haute plant purchased its first APB unit in 1995. In 1997 Ed Proffitt, senior engineering manager, and his team began building its own APBs. “Building and installing our own APB was a cost reduction in terms of the unit itself,” notes Smiley. “But by doing it ourselves we now have the flexibility to change anything anytime and we have created our own in-house experts who can do that.”

This flexibility has also allowed the engineering teams to make several changes, from motor drivers and shuttle design, sensors and sensor locations, even down to the type of labels going on the totes, to increase their efficiency and reliability.

The whole AGV, APB and robotic transport, packaging and palletizing system is controlled by Sony’s software control system, which was developed in-house by Sony’s own IT group from an Oracle platform.

Group dynamics
By a unanimous vote, the number one reason for the Terre Haute team’s success is its all-inclusive approach to solving problems. Applying the disciplines of Six Sigma to challenges provides a structured, repeatable strategy for attacking challenges, but the secret sauce of the program is its truly cross-functional involvement.

“When we face a challenge, everybody from the top to the bottom gets involved,” Schafer notes. “On that printing example we had operators, technicians, supervisors, engineers, project leaders, managers, and me, an engineering director, all involved in working out what we can do to make this machine give us more discs per day. We don’t just have one person walking out on the floor saying, ‘Come on, you’ve gotta make this run better.’ We get together and say, ‘What can we do to develop an engineering solution so it runs better day-in and day-out regardless of who the operator is?’ ”

To aid in this effort and to help achieve a related goal, early this year the maintenance staff began reporting to engineering.

“The importance of getting maintenance technicians involved in the building and integration-installation phase is that the earlier they are involved, the more they will understand the processes and the more they will take ownership,” says Proffitt. “We want the techs to touch pieces very rarely; we’d rather have them spend their time on the process itself.”

The secondary goal of this reorganization is to help establish a more formalized system for continuing technician training.

“This will give the technicians opportunities for development and growth in their current positions as well as opportunities for advancement in the company,” Schafer explains. “Giving them engineering’s guidance will help them develop better skills to go into engineering roles down the road.”

Up next: Blu-ray
Blu-ray, Sony’s most sophisticated disc product so far, will likely become the primary focus of the engineering and maintenance teams for the next few years. This historical pattern has repeated itself several times as new product lines have been launched.

“Our emphasis shifts over time, usually to our newest technology,” Proffitt says. “CDs were tough to handle when we first started producing them, too, but now they’re no problem. Now, within a year we’ll be shifting our focus and most of our time to Blu-ray. That product is brand new so all of us — production, engineering and maintenance — are on page one together.”

Having production, engineering and maintenance all working together to solve such problems makes solid sense. Everyone learns the new machinery at the same time, and everyone has a chance to help develop new solutions.

In Terre Haute, the Sony team has proven this approach works. Since 1983, the plant has grown from 100 employees to more than 1,200, has increased production from an initial 3.6 million discs a year to 2.5 million a day, and has never laid off an employee. Numbers don’t lie: equipment engineering, maintenance and repurposing and the dedicated professionals who perform these minor miracles every day play a critical role in that success.

This article appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2006.

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