At some point, you likely learned about Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. Usually these concepts are discussed around writing or journalism in school to make sure you get all of the information and write a complete story.

Manufacturing can be similar. Ultimately, you are giving your customers a complete story—and communicating it with your manufacturing capabilities, your team, and your expertise. All together you’re building relationships, shipping quality goods to your customers, and providing opportunities for your team organization to learn, grow, and succeed.

Since Digital Transformation is still a very hot topic in manufacturing, it seemed like the perfect time to return to first principles. In this article, we’ll explain the available technology options and demonstrate how they could fit into your operations. Our goal is to also provide a greater understanding of every moving piece in your day to day life.

Why

Why are you making what you’re making? This is the first question to ask before any production run. The answer will usually be that you’re meeting customer demand for products, making parts for other operations (which will ultimately meet customer demand), or that you’re building up inventory to manage demand in the next period of time.

Ultimately, the why will be that you need to produce goods so that your company can make money.

Who

The who of any production run is also strongly related to security. While approaches to production security can be as simple as the specific accounts your operators use in your SCADA system, it can be as complex as the access rights configuration to the production data across your entire operation.

With Inductive Automation’s Ignition as your SCADA system, you can even track all of your users’ interactions with the built-in Audit Log. The log provides a historical record of every interaction your users have with your system.

What

What you are making is in your work orders or production orders. This is a powerful first step in any Manufacturing Execution System (MES) integration.

By pulling in the upcoming work orders from your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, you can quickly plan what you are making, which raw materials are required on the line, and what needs to be in place to ship those orders out to your customers.

As part of an overall MES strategy, the what of your production can also integrate with a Track and Traceability System. This will provide the details of each step of production, including which raw materials were used, and what operations were performed at each equipment station.

When

The when of running production is heavily integrated with your overall production schedule. A production schedule is where you can plan the timing of your work orders, staffing resources, raw materials, and make sure they’re also synced with any shipping requirements.

With visibility of your production schedule (along with any production slowdowns) you can quickly make adjustments along the way. If you know of any upcoming delays, you can also quickly update customers or other departments in your company before causing additional issues. Tracking all of these data points is relatively simple with an Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) integration, which can also integrate with your production schedule and work orders.

Where

For many companies, where you are making your products is a pretty simple question to answer. If you only have one facility, and only one (or a few production lines), you know where you are making everything.

For larger enterprises with multiple facilities with different capabilities, you can make strategic decisions based on your work orders and scheduling requirements to produce goods in the most efficient manner possible across your enterprise.

Don’t Forget “How”

How you are running production unites all the work orders, production schedules, and staffing resources to pull the entire operation together.

The how of manufacturing adds features like recipe management, and can integrate digital work order instructions into the process. This gives your operators a standard operating procedure to follow for any operation, and integrates quality management to ensure that production is meeting your (and your customers’) stringent quality requirements.

The concept of how can help you discover how to track other information like energy usage across your facility. Energy usage is a impactful and practival way to gain a greater understanding of the overall costs associated with production and how to optimize those costs to benefit your bottom line.

Wrapping Up

Digging into the 5 Ws and How for your manufacturing operation is a great exercise for find gaps in your process, data collection methods, and overall capability as a company.

Who, what, when, where, why, and how will lead you to areas you can improve integration across your organization to improve efficiency, reduce downtime, reduce scrap/rework, and ultimately make better products for your customer, more consistently.

With tools like dashboards, SQCDP boards, and even map-based tools, you can keep everyone on your team up to date during production.