By Bill Lydon, Editor Spring is a time of new beginnings and new life. So why can’t we breathe new life into our automation systems? It's a good time for automation engineers to consider new innovative automation applications to improve production. Many companies are dealing with budget constraints. It is more important than ever for automation engineers to find innovative and creative ways to get more value from their existing plant equipment and machines and the automation systems that control them. Automation people inside the company are the most informed experts on their company’s production processes and in the best position to initiate improvements.
A good first task is to step away from the day to day tasks of supporting automation to take a fresh look at things. Value Engineering (VE) is a technique that can be useful and has its roots in Value Analysis (VA). I learned VE/VA early in my career and have applied it in product design, automation, and organizational development. Lawrence (Larry) D.
Miles, a design engineer at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, is considered the "Father of Value Analysis." Miles developed the concept of function analysis to address difficulties in satisfying the requirements to fill shortages of high demand manufactured parts and electrical components during World War II. Thus, the concept of function analysis was born, which is the fundamental principal that Value Analysis or Value Engineering is based on. Later, in the 1960s, Charles W. Bytheway, an engineer at Sperry Univac developed the methodology called Function Analysis Systems Technique, or FAST, to decompose a basic function and organize it into a logic diagram called a FAST model.
Functional analysis is a powerful method to gain new perspectives and insights when looking at a product, machine, process, or other item by breaking it down into functions. Then based on the functions, you brainstorm better ways to accomplish those functions to lower cost, improve performance, etc. A classic example used to learning the techniques is doing a functional analysis of a fly swatter. The analysis starts by asking, “What is the function of a fly swatter?” Then, the goal is to listing as many functions as you can by using a noun and a verb. Answers typically include: crushing flies, injuring flies, killing flies, etc.
The term “killing flies” is a good functional description using a verb and a noun to start building a hierarchy of functions. This example may seem simple but if you take a process or machine and start looking at the high level function and then further look at the sub-functions you build a hierarchy of these definitions. In the fly swatter example, just by starting with “killing flies,” you can ask why you kill flies and go up the hierarchy ultimately to a higher level, such as improve health. If you ask, “How?” at any level, you go down the hierarchy and create other alternatives. In this example, by asking, “How to kill flies?” you can yield a wide range of answers from electrocution to birth control.
The big advantage in this technique is it forces you to decompose into smaller pieces and think of other alternatives. This model provides new insights and opens opportunities to apply creativity to develop new ways, or alternative ways of accomplishing these functions. Questions lead to creativity, and answers lead to innovations. Sometimes it is fantasizing how this process could be done if some rules were suspended such as budget, physics, and gravity. It can lead to non-obvious ideas.
Look at what is going on in your production processes. Identify what is slowing production or impacting quality to find areas to explore. It helps to collaborate with other people involved, including operators and maintenance people. A big obstacle to new ideas is making assumptions such as, “It’s never been done that way before,” and other negative responses. These thoughts will stop you dead.
Here are some things that were not thought possible in the past. The first successful cast-iron plow was invented in the U.S. in 1797. It was rejected by New Jersey farmers under the theory that cast iron poisoned the land and stimulated growth of weeds.
Men insisted that iron ships would not float, that they would damage more easily than wooden ships when grounding, that it would be difficult to preserve the iron bottoms from rust, and that iron would deflect the compass. This spring may be a good time to consider new innovative automation applications to improve production.
