Lyons Blow Molding, a subsidiary of the C.L. Smith Company, is a manufacturer of HDPE bottles and containers utilized across multiple industries and is based out of St. Louis, Missouri, with 18 production lines and custom stock molds.
Real-time Data Helps Lincoln Manufacturing Improve Customer Service
By switching from heavily manual reporting processes to Smart Factory, Lyons Blow Molding gained real-time data visibility into its machinery processes, while drastically cutting down on non-value added work and greatly reducing errors downstream, leading to greater customer satisfaction.
The Problem:
Lyons Blow Molding needed a production monitoring and reporting system for two reasons:
- To reduce its reliance on heavily manual, non-value added work associated with its labeling and reporting processes. In doing so, the company hoped to increase data accuracy while freeing up its employees to work on higher value tasks.
- To gain the production data visibility needed to assess its order accuracy and reduce errors made during production.
Outcomes:
Lyons Blow Molding integrated Nulogy Smart Factory with its labeling system to automate its processes and reporting. By switching to Smart Factory to track and report production activity, the company was able to reduce errors, increase data accuracy, and minimize the number of problems downstream.
More specifically, Lyons Blow Molding observed benefits in the following areas:
Increased Accuracy and Reporting Automation: As Dave Aquilina, VP of Operations, explains: “Accuracy has been a much-improved activity. Performance is now auditable. There’s a history of any given day or shift that we can go back and audit. Before, there was no auditing because it was a number in time put on a spreadsheet…as you can imagine, accuracy provides good inventory numbers and leads to less customer satisfaction issues.”
Greater Process Control: With Smart Factory, Lyons Blow Molding has its real-time process data easily available in a dashboard, allowing staff to track current and historical data for any given line and pinpoint issues more effectively. Further, Lyons now also uses Smart Factory’s real-time notifications to send alerts when any machinery operates beyond its standard parameters.
Extended Data Visibility: With the new level of data visibility provided by Smart Factory, Lyons Blow Molding can share its production data across the plant for the benefit of all employees.
