Manufacturing Without Pen and Paper (or Excel)

Aug 6

Tommy watched in horror as a gust of wind from the loading dock scattered a tall stack of production reports across the factory floor. Workers scrambled to collect the papers, but he knew the damage was done. Somewhere among those scattered sheets was the critical batch documentation for their largest customer order, due to ship in two hours.

As the Operations Manager at a precision components manufacturing company, Tommy had already seen his share of paper-related disasters. There was the infamous "coffee incident" last month, when a single spilled cup of coffee obliterated an entire week's worth of quality control data. The "great filing cabinet mix-up" that took three days and two overtime shifts to untangle. And who could forget the time when a simple smudged serial number led to shipping 500 defective parts that had to be recalled from three different states?

But today's wind-blown catastrophe felt like the final straw. Tommy surveyed the chaos around him: clipboard-wielding supervisors hunting for missing work orders, quality inspectors armed with calculators trying to tally handwritten measurements, and inventory clerks making frantic phone calls to track down parts that existed somewhere in a maze of paper trails and Post-it notes.

The irony wasn't lost on him. Here they were, manufacturing precision-engineered components for aerospace and automotive industries. Products that required tolerances measured in thousandths of an inch, yet their tracking system relied on pencil marks and human memory. Every hand off was a potential point of failure. Every transcription was a chance for error. Every misfiled document was a customer complaint waiting to happen.

Tommy's phone buzzed with a text from the plant manager: "Customer wants real-time status update on Order #47821. ETA?" He stared at the message, knowing that finding the current status of that order would require physically walking the floor, hunting through multiple clipboards and stacks of paper, and then hoping the information was actually recorded somewhere. In a world where customers expected Amazon-level transparency, they were operating with technology that hadn't evolved since the 1950s.

As another gust of wind sent more papers dancing across the factory floor, Tommy made a mental note to schedule that long-overdue meeting with the IT department. Something had to change and fast. It was only a matter of time before the next windstorm, the next coffee spill, or the next customer complaint buried his company completely in their own paper trail.

The Manufacturing Paper Trail

Let’s face the facts, writing something down is the easiest way to track data. It is usually the default approach when better tools aren’t available. Or when better tools might be available, but they’re difficult to use, aren’t included with the overall manufacturing process, or require plant floor operators to break their routine to go enter data into a form (which will reduce their overall effectiveness). On older equipment, paper-based data collection might even be actual paper on a chart recorder that tracks process data for each piece of equipment.

You may be managing your production schedules on paper, or keeping track of detailed production throughput information with a spreadsheet or pencil and paper. Also, you probably have many different pieces of equipment with individual operator interfaces and data collection systems. Not to mention, correlating the data across all of your machines can be a full time job in these situations.

Paper-based processes can also lose important granularity depending on what your team tracks, how they interpret production situations for tracking downtime, starved, or blocked equipment, and even how they track which work order is running on the line.

Compiling all of this information requires gathering many individual pieces of paper, keeping them in order, and having someone on the team focused on entering the data into your systems so you can use it for process analysis. The pain caused by this process leads many companies to the solution they likely already have. While Excel is arguably better than paper at keeping things in one place, it’s still not fully integrated into your overall business operating system.

For Excel’s Hammer, Every Problem is a Nail

To be clear, Excel can be a great tool. Most of the Corso Systems team has it open on their computer at all times during project development, and it can help solve a lot of problems easily.

Many people save Excel files with built in calculations and macros for analyzing production data without having to click a button, and Excel gives you access to common process analysis tools like trends. You can even use conditional formatting to highlight out of range values to track alarm conditions or process upsets at a glance.

But soon, it will become a problem that Excel is a spreadsheet and not a database. All of the data in your Excel document is contained only in that document. And while you can integrate data from multiple files into one, and even use Excel to read data directly from PLCs and SCADA systems or databases with a fair amount of extra development effort, there are big downsides to this approach over time. All of that extra development effort will also add complexity to the overall system, and the links between files can break if they are moved to a new folder on the PC. Or if someone just edits an Excel file you have linked, this can lead to a journey down a rabbit hole to find and update all the missing links.

For these reasons, our approach to using Excel focuses on data analysis and reporting (with Excel documents automatically generated from an Ignition SCADA system). This strategy leverages Ignition as the translator between all of your plant floor equipment and the source of truth for all of your data. Ignition can then save Excel files with the relevant information you need for your job, formatted exactly how you want it to look. And it can do this without having to create, manage, or update links between multiple files. Beyond using Ignition as your process data’s source of truth, you can also integrate data from the Excel files your team uses if they are collecting information that isn’t yet integrated into the process itself.

Go Beyond Pen and Paper or Excel Spreadsheets with Ignition

With older equipment, you might already have data collection systems in place. But, many legacy options will require you to export data to a CSV file from each piece of equipment to bring it into another system. Or you might be relying on your operators to carefully track information by hand throughout their shifts. Unfortunately, this often leads to lost information when things get busy on the plant floor and can take mountains of extra effort to make sense of the data you do have from these busy times. Not to mention, none of this data will be tracked in real time.

There are many solutions for solving these problems, along with ever-present buzzwords like Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0, and whatever else the marketing departments come up with next month.

Our favorite solution to solving the pen and paper problem and/pr removing Excel as the backbone of your data collection and analysis systems is Ignition.

Ignition can connect to just about any process control hardware on the market, giving you access to real-time data collection for all of your equipment. From the very beginning Ignition has focused on integrating this data into databases. Compared to Excel, this gives you a single copy of the data you can use across your entire business.

Ignition can also replace paper-based data collection processes where you need operators to note particular values by creating data entry forms to save the data that they’d normally write down. Now this data can be stored in the database along with any relevant information like the current work order or batch ID so you can pull everything together without needing any manual interventions to make sense of it all.

If you want to still use Excel for data analysis, you can always easily export Excel documents from Ignition with all of the relevant calculations you’re accustomed to. This will save you the hassle of opening up a file, copying over the data from the latest run and running the calculations. In this case, Ignition gives you the power of what you are used to, minus all of the hassles that manual data collection adds to your operations.

Wrapping Up

It’s important to choose the right solution to your paper-based problems so that you can meet your current needs, but gain the capability to grow. It can be a daunting task as many of these options come with a high cost of ownership, expensive integration services to get everything connected, and the risk of getting locked into a substantial support contract. You might even find the system potentially locked down unless you invest in training your people to manage it themselves!

Plus, if you’ve experienced or even approached this process in the past, it can be difficult to trust another company to help take your business to the next level, collect all of the relevant data you need to understand your operations, and then hope they know what they are doing so you don’t have to hold their hand through the entire process.

Corso Systems’ approach to customer service avoids all of the business hassles you might be used to when integrating complex systems, and Ignition handles the technical details for you.

Through all of our years of working with manufacturers across many industries (and at various points of their automation journey), we decided there had to be a better way. This is why we created our fully customizable industry-specific Corso Systems Power Packs as a starting point to help companies solve their paper problem with one small project.