Injection moulding specialists, have been an advocate of production monitoring since 1982 when they installed a monitoring system and have continuously upgraded it ever since then.
Holloid Plastics, injection moulding specialists, have been an advocate of production monitoring since 1982 when they installed a Barco (Dextralog) FSX monitoring system. Since then they have continuously upgraded the system, latterly with the Plantmaster Windows-based manufacturing execution system (MES). 'The use of the Barco system has been one of the major contributing factors that has enabled us to remain competitive over all these years.

We have had great value from the system.

I do not think we could function efficiently without it,' said Julian van Wyngaarden, managing director of the family company, which was started by his father in 1950.

Holloid Plastics manufacture between two to three million components a month across a wide range of industries, including office equipment, child care, lighting, burglar alarms and water softeners.

'Holloid strive to provide a very high quality manufacturing service, so that we can give customers what they need at the right price.

It is also important that our short runs are profitable, which is one of the reasons why we have installed robotic handling equipment on our machines.

Whatever the run length, it is essential to keep very tight control of our production from planning through to injection moulding, which is why we rely on the Barco system to monitor accurately all our machines ranging from 30 to 650 tons,' he explained.

'Holloid also have to be very flexible to manufacture such a wide range of components with a lot of tool changes.

Twelve tool changes in a day would not be unusual.

In order to process urgent orders, we constantly have to re-prioritise our workload and that is where the automated Barco scheduling system is such a bonus because you can see the jobs in the pipeline,' he explained.

A Barco data unit on each of the machines monitors a range of activities and reasons for down-time.

These include set-up times, cycle times and the required order quantity against the actual, so that our machine minders can immediately see the balance.

Plantmaster also monitors the amount of material needed to finish the job avoiding both stock out and over stock situations.

The Plantmaster machine layout is displayed on a monitor on the shop floor and colour coded to show at a glance if machines are running, idle or exceeding the cycle time.

Plantmaster displays all the information collected from the data units in real-time, together with the job code.

Holloid produce daily reports, so that they can compare the OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) against a number of targets.

'We are constantly looking to improve our service levels and there is a lot of information the Barco system can give us that could help us in this area.

For example, we can look at the historical data to analyse performance where one job is manufactured on a number of machines, to see whether some machines run better than others and the reasons why.

We currently transfer the data from our sales order processing system to the Barco software manually but are in the process of implementing an MRP system and automatically linking the Barco system to it.' Holloid also intend to add a process monitoring facility to the Barco system, in order to measure changes of cooling water temperature, amongst other parameters, at each moulding machine to further improve consistency of production.

Finally van Wyngaarden plans to upgrade the existing data units on the Barco system, some of which are twenty years old and still going strong.

'The hard-wired data units have been exceptional value but they will not go on for ever.

I am now talking to Barco about their latest wireless technology for collecting data from the machines, which will be more cost-effective and simpler to install.' * About Barco - Barco, an international company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium, provides visualization and display solutions for professional markets.

Barco designs and develops solutions for large screen visualization, display solutions for life-critical applications, and systems for visual inspection.

Barco is active worldwide and has its own facilities for Sales and Marketing, Customer Support, R and D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.