When he arrived at the head of the plant in 2019, Cyril Varraux immediately wanted to set up short-interval management meetings (AIC). A brief update that takes plant management to the field every morning, from sector to sector, to take stock of the issues and potential difficulties of the day.
From paper to real-time information between teams
The Metso Outotec plant in Mâcon is one of the flagships of the Finnish group Metso Outotec (17,000 employees, present on 5 continents). The site employs 360 people (including 120 in production), and puts 350 crushers and 100 screens on the market each year: small series of (very) large machines (25 to 50 tonnes) that mine and quarry operators use to crush, sort, and process the materials they extract.
Access the full article of the visual management digitization project of Metso Outotec on the blog article : here
Ultimately, what seduced me was that Pingflow is a startup, flexible and attentive to our needs, and which has been very proactive in helping us shape our ideas. A bigger actor, software editor or digital service company, that would have rather scared us away…
Cyril Varraux, Site director
Goals
At Metso, visual management first started with “paper” signs and Velleda boards. But very quickly, the need to change was felt. In the sharing of information between two areas of the plant.
To update its visual management panels, each team referred to the weekly schedule integrated into the plant’s ERP. To make the right decisions based on current information, everyone’s schedule had to be shared and updated in real time. So digitized.
Challenges
Pingflow’s choice concerns the digital visual management solution:
- is easy to set up and administer by Cyril Varraux and his teams. “In terms of jobs, we know precisely what we want, but we have few computer skills: with Pingflow and its wallboard editor Pingview, it’s never blocking”
- makes it possible to generate interfaces whose ergonomics “is really designed for users who operate on machines”
- is automatically designed for the industrial world, with great references in this area
In parallel with the SIM visual management panels deployed in the plant, Metso Outotec has launched a visualization project between:
- upstream of production, i.e. sales administration, which centralizes
- the internal “orders” of salespeople, downstream, with shipments.
Solutions
The implementation of SIM board at Metso: collaborative work
The choice of the right partner and the right solution was all the more crucial had a very specific plan in mind: above all not to impose these future digital AIC screens, but to co-design them with their future users. And get the teams to imagine the improvements to be made to the organization themselves.
Via the visual management panels, Metso Outotec Mâcon can follow a kind of production workflow:
- by going to “draw” from a database that matches the machines and the components used in their manufacture,
- the teams modeled the series of operations and parts needed at each stage,
- and then it only remains for each operator to report when he has started and finished his task.
Results
The benefits of digital AICs:
- More efficient meetings: With up-to-date, centralized and shared information, decisions are made without gray areas, and with the right “entrants”
- No more hiccups in communication: screens have put an end to the endless exchanges of informal information
- A calmer climate
- Increased productivity
The benefits of display wallboards between logistics detr sales administration:
- better visibility on the volumes to be produced, and therefore the supplies to be triggered,
- a more secure schedule, with the possibility of checking that between the order and the delivery, the factory is on time,
- at the end of the chain, better traceability of machines during shipments.
