One of the greatest benefits of AMS products is the ability to link the factory floor to the office network. Known as Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), this capability leads to greater throughput with fewer mistakes, more uptime, and less scrap. While we don’t use roll forming or folding machines in our manufacturing processes at AMS, we have developed a unique CIM application of our own utilizing the XL200 and Eclipse combination.
More and more often, customers are buying not just a controller from us but also an operator station or full electrical system to go with it. While the majority of these are based on our standard designs, we also have many highly customized projects. That’s when we turn to our Integrated Systems department.
The Integrated Systems designers first design the electrical circuits in a program called E3. E3 not only allows us to create the electrical schematics for a system, but also the physical layout of the electrical panels.
As part of the electrical panel layout process, the designer specifies the routing for all wires through the wire ducts. E3 automatically verifies that no design rules have been violated and calculates the length for each wire. We then export this information as well as the bill of materials (BOM) for the project. The BOM goes to Microsoft Dynamics NAV (our ERP system) and the wire data goes to Eclipse.
Our console production area includes two wire machines that we’ve retrofitted with XL200 controllers. Eclipse downloads the wire information to the XL200s and the wire machine produces the stripped wires to the correct length automatically. Eclipse also prints heat shrink wire labels so they are automatically synchronized with the wire production. The wire labels tell the wiring technician exactly where to route the wire in the console.
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This system, along with other design and process improvements, has led to a dramatic improvement in productivity and quality in our electrical panel production. As an example, one particular design that we produce in relatively high volume used to take an average of 53 hours of preparation and wiring time. That same system can be completed in less than 16 hours and the wiring errors caught during beep and system testing have been virtually eliminated.
While wiring machine controls are not in AMS’ development plans, it has been a beneficial experience for us to incorporate our own products in an internal manufacturing process. Like our customers, we have seen an increase in throughput and fewer mistakes as a result of integrating the XL200 along with Eclipse in our own production system.