The client is an international smart home and home security company with a large fleet of proprietary molds entirely located at third-party suppliers. 

The difficulty of consistently collecting data from their molds resulted in poor visibility into their supply chain, making it impossible to prevent quality issues and to predict delays in part deliveries.

Client needs

Late part deliveries. The most looming problem for the client concerned stock-outs and consequent assembly line downtimes caused by delays in supplier deliveries. Such downtimes caused a significant loss in OEE, complicating planning and curbing warehouse turnover. This resulted in significant slowdowns in time-to-market, with longer delivery times to clients, thus carrying the risk of losing orders and incurring penalties.

‍Quality. Frequent quality problems further aggravated the stock situation for certain parts. The lack of transparency in the relationship with suppliers made it impossible to work on prevention and improve incoming quality.

‍Supplier performance. The lack of visibility into supplier processes made it impossible to evaluate their performance, compare them and distinguish between virtuous and opportunistic suppliers. This fact did not allow for optimal supplier selection.

‍Inventory and maintenance. The loan for use of the molds to numerous different suppliers made inventory management activities extremely complex. Furthermore, since it was not possible to verify the maintenance performed by the suppliers, it was not possible to estimate the health and residual useful life of the molds.

Solution benefits

Visibility on the outsourced production. Thanks to MATIX it was possible to monitor the performance of the molds and the progress of production at the suppliers. In this way, the client was able to reduce the risks associated with stock-out, implementing preventive actions when necessary. This has made it possible to reduce assembly line downtimes by 5%, save over 500 man-hours per year and increase the time-to-market by 15% for the products most affected by stock-outs.‍

Identification of quality issues. The process visibility enabled by MATIX has made it possible to timely detect production downtimes or deviations from the standard cycle time, encouraging the supplier to check in advance for non-conformity of the parts and to implement corrective actions, such as maintenance on the mold. Thanks to a heatmap, MATIX has enabled an aggregated view of the mold fleet a all suppliers, allowing problems to be easily identified and prevented. This made it possible to reduce returns by 10% for the most impacted components.‍

Supplier performance monitoring. By cross-referencing the data from MATIX with returns and delivery delays, it was possible to clearly identify the most problematic suppliers. By promoting a more collaborative and transparent approach, the system has allowed the suppliers to promptly communicate any problems with the process. Furthermore, the access to MATIX data granted to suppliers has enabled them to perform mold maintenance management more efficiently and to constantly monitor mold performance, finding ways to increase their OEE.

Both the client and the supplier appreciated the speed and ease of installation of MATIX, which does not need a gateway to transmit data to the cloud.

Maintenance and inventory management. Thanks to MATIX it was possible to provide the client with the location history of each mold, without interruptions in monitoring thanks to cellular connectivity. Furthermore, by observing patterns in the data it was possible to get an indication of whether the agreed maintenance had actually been carried out by the suppliers. 

The convergence of all mold data into a single database, together with a complete registry of the molds, has made it possible to reduce data entry and auditing activities by 50%. With more reliable and easily available data, it was also possible to improve the CAPEX budgeting process on new molds, avoiding unnecessary duplication and reducing expenditure by 5%.

Results

-5% Downtimes
+2% Supplier OEE
-9% on the cost of supply
-50% Mold Management activities
-5% CAPEX for new molds
-10% on existing scrap rate