Bringing Transparency and Situational Awareness to The Shopfloor – Factory Cockpit at Tasowheel

Tasowheel is a Finnish family-owned contract manufacturer founded in 1979. The company has established itself as a leader in precision engineering with over 45 years of experience.

The Need for Digital Transformation

Manufacturing companies, Tasowheel included, often face challenges related to limited visibility into machine activity and utilization, which can lead to communication gaps between production leaders and planners. This lack of real-time information might make it more difficult to ensure that production is progressing according to schedule.

Another common challenge in manufacturing is maintaining efficient machine utilization and minimizing downtime. Without clear insights into machine performance and production processes, workers may spend excessive time troubleshooting issues and managing the operation when unexpected production stops occur. This can lead to bottlenecks, under-utilized resources, and difficulties in optimizing production schedules. As a result, overall efficiency is decreased and order progress can be slowed down.

Recognizing these issues, Tasowheel aimed to find a solution that improved real-time insights, supported informed decision-making, and helped improve communication among different departments within the organization. The company also recognized that digitalization was crucial in ensuring such seamless information flow across all levels; making it easier for managers to make informed decisions and enabling operators to stay fully aligned with the production plan. This not only enables quicker responses to problems but also strengthens knowledge-based management by providing more data on potential challenges. As a result, transparency is improved from the shop floor all the way to upper management, and that is what Tasowheel was aiming for.

Introducing Factory Cockpit

To improve manufacturing digitalization, Tasowheel partnered with Fastems to implement Factory Cockpit, a leading production analytics tool for manufacturing. FC connects IT systems like ERP or MES and shop floor machinery, offering real-time view to production key metrics, machine statuses and the progress of production orders. The outcome is full situational awareness, enabling faster and better decision making, production process development and more.

Jarmo Kuikka, the former Managing Director of Tasowheel, concludes on the pilot project, ” Factory Cockpit is a must-have. It has enabled real-time production visibility and tools for tracking production efficiency and sharing information conveniently.” Let’s look at what that means in practice and how the implementation of Factory Cockpit took place.

Factory Cockpit Key Outcomes for Tasowheel

• Improved production management decision-making: FC provides a clear picture of production performance, enabling better resource allocation and timely responses to issues.
• Enhanced communication: The tool facilitates seamless communication across departments, making information sharing more efficient and allowing users to use the insights in ways that benefit their daily tasks
• Increased efficiency: By identifying and addressing bottlenecks, Tasowheel has reduced machine downtime and improve overall productivity.
• Data-driven insights: FC’s comprehensive visualization capabilities allowed Tasowheel to detect quality issues, assess product profitability, and make informed investment decisions.

Read more on Tasowheel’s journey with Fastems’ Factory Cockpit!