Manufacturing Process Analysis: Starting Points for Fast

Improvements

Submitted to:

Mam Adeela Pervaiz

Submitted by:

Group 4

Muhammad Usama Umar (09)

Murad bin Khalid (32)

Ibrar Hussain (43)

Shabahat Hussain (45)

Dilawar Shah (49)

Semester:

8th Regular (2020-2024)

Department:

Malik Firoz Khan Noon Business School

University of Sargodha
What Is Manufacturing Process Analysis?

A manufacturing process's performance

is analyzed using manufacturing process analysis, or MPA. This approach involves
examining procedures to make sure they satisfy the organization's requirements and
are in line with its goals. These requirements can be broadly categorized into
several key areas:

1. Quality Standards: Ensuring the products manufactured meet specific

quality benchmarks, which could include durability, reliability, functionality,
and appearance.

2. Production Efficiency: This involves maximizing productivity through

optimizing the use of resources (such as materials, equipment, and labor) and
minimizing waste. Efficiency requirements might include increasing
throughput, reducing cycle time, and improving workflow.

3. Cost Effectiveness: Keeping production costs within budget without

compromising quality. This could involve strategies for cost reduction in
materials, labor, energy, and overheads.

4. Compliance with Regulations: Adhering to all relevant legal and regulatory

requirements, including environmental regulations, health and safety
standards, and labor laws. This often includes compliance with industry-
specific guidelines and practices.

5. Environmental Impact: Implementing processes that reduce environmental

degradation, such as reducing emissions, minimizing waste production, and
using sustainable materials.
MPA can cover any stage of the product life cycle, including:

• Product design
• Assembly
• Quality control
• Scheduling
• Maintenance

Product Design:

In the product design stage, MPA focuses on ensuring that

products are designed not only for functionality and aesthetic appeal but also for
manufacturability and ease of assembly.

Assembly:

During the assembly phase, MPA looks at the actual construction of the
product

Quality Control:

Quality control is critical in ensuring the product meets or exceeds

customer and regulatory standards.

Scheduling:

Effective scheduling is crucial to ensure that production processes flow

smoothly and efficiently

Maintenance:

Maintenance of equipment and facilities is essential to prevent

unexpected downtime and maintain consistent production quality
To enhance smart manufacturing procedures, machine learning (ML) and artificial
intelligence (AI) technologies are frequently combined with MPA.

The majority of the industrial industry is moving toward smart manufacturing.

Recent research indicates that until at least 2028, the machine learning industry is
anticipated to develop at a rate faster than the 38.6% compound annual growth rate
(CAGR).

When AI and ML are used with manufacturing process analysis, more insight may
be obtained with less work. Faster advancements and more flexible corporate
processes are made possible by effective big data analytics. Any process's
efficiency may be rapidly evaluated, bottlenecks can be found, and solutions can be
found using machine learning tools.

Machine learning systems have the ability to create and evaluate models to enhance
several aspects of business, such as customer happiness, sales, and product quality,
in addition to production capacity

How to Develop an MPA Strategy?

A plan is needed to use AI and ML

technologies to analyze industrial operations. Manufacturing process analysis
typically involves the following steps in its workflow:

• Value identification
• Data acquisition
• Data processing
• Data analysis
 • Machine learning
• Model deployment

1. Value Identification

This initial phase involves pinpointing specific goals and areas where AI and ML
can add value to the manufacturing process. It’s about understanding what problems
need solving and what improvements are sought. This could involve:

• Increasing efficiency: Identifying bottlenecks in production lines or areas

with high downtime.

• Enhancing quality: Detecting defects earlier in the production process or

reducing scrap rates.

• Reducing costs: Optimizing resource usage, including materials and energy,

or minimizing labor costs through automation.

• Predictive maintenance: Identifying equipment likely to fail and scheduling

maintenance to prevent downtime.

2. Data Acquisition

Once the targets have been identified, the next step is to gather data relevant to
those goals. This involves setting up sensors and data collection systems across
various parts of the manufacturing process. The data could include:

• Operational data: Machine speeds, feed rates, and settings.

• Quality data: Inspection results, defect rates, and product testing data.

• Environmental data: Temperature, humidity, and other environmental

conditions affecting production.
 • Resource data: Consumption data for materials, energy, etc. Data
acquisition should ensure completeness, accuracy, and timeliness to facilitate
effective analysis.

3. Data Processing

Data collected from industrial operations often comes in raw forms that are not
immediately suitable for analysis. Processing is necessary to clean, normalize, and
structure this data. Steps include:

• Cleaning: Removing outliers, correcting errors, and handling missing values.

• Normalizing: Scaling data to a uniform scale to prevent biases based on

measurement scales.

• Feature engineering: Creating new data points (features) from raw data that
better represent the underlying processes for predictive models.

4. Data Analysis

This stage involves exploring the processed data to uncover patterns and insights.
Techniques used might include:

• Statistical analysis: Descriptive statistics to get a basic understanding of

data distributions and relationships.

• Exploratory data analysis (EDA): Using visualizations like histograms,

scatter plots, and box plots to find patterns, trends, and anomalies in the data.

5. Machine Learning

Based on insights and patterns discovered during data analysis, machine learning
models are developed to predict outcomes or classify data. This step includes:
 • Choosing a model: Based on the problem type (regression, classification,
clustering).

• Training the model: Using historical data to train the model to recognize
patterns and make predictions.

• Validation: Testing the model on a separate dataset to ensure it performs

well on unseen data.

6. Model Deployment

The final step involves implementing the machine learning model into the
production environment so that it can start providing real-time predictions and
insights. Deployment includes:

• Integration: Ensuring the model interfaces smoothly with existing

production systems and data flows.

• Monitoring: Continuously checking the model’s performance to catch any

degradation over time.

• Updates: Refining and retraining the model with new data and feedback to
maintain its accuracy and relevance.

Companies have to evaluate a process's worth and the possible benefits of any
changes first. A manufacturer could wish to lower the quantity of waste produced
by a certain process, for instance. It is important to monitor waste reduction, cost
savings, and time savings using well-defined measures.
MPA requires collecting data from each process element. This might include labor,
cost, and total production statistics, as well as data from sensors attached to
industrial machinery.

After then, the data is processed. To make sure the data collection is free of
duplicates and missing information, it must be cleaned. Several analytical and
machine learning techniques may be applied to produce insights once the data has
been collected and cleaned.

Using MPA to Improve Product Quality

Enhancing product quality is only one of

the numerous benefits of incorporating MPA into decision-making. Finding
problems that might affect a product's quality is made easier with a thorough
examination of the production process.

By identifying the underlying cause of a quality problem, the analysis's knowledge

enables engineers and analysts to put a solution in place. With the correct tools,
manufacturers can solve quality concerns more quickly.

Increasing Overall Equipment Effectiveness

The effectiveness of the equipment

being utilized has a big impact on both process cost and efficiency. MPA
contributes to a higher return on investment (ROI) and improved production quality
by raising overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
Machines with higher efficiency require less maintenance and have less downtime.
They also have a lower probability of producing flaws. These advantages enable
businesses to extract greater value from their production processes.

Challenges of Implementing Manufacturing Process Analysis

Implementing an MPA strategy includes

three key challenges:

• A high volume of data

• Wide variety of data
• Access to real-time data

Access to a large amount of data may be necessary for manufacturing process

analysis. Data may be gathered by manufacturers from sensors, suppliers,
distributors, and other outside sources.

Additionally, a wide range of sources contribute to data collecting. The information

might be kept in many physical places, cloud networks, and databases.

The capacity to handle data rapidly is further limited by the amount of diverse data
that must be gathered and analyzed. With conventional data gathering techniques,
manufacturers are unable to acquire real-time analytics. The secret to obtaining
insightful and useful information is to use a specialized solution for data collection,
processing, and analysis. For an MPA strategy to be successful, selecting the
appropriate partner is also crucial. In order to acquire data, analyze it, and create
better procedures, collaborate with a seasoned data science firm to put the systems
in place.