In the future, actual root causes of disturbances can be evaluated and analyzed better than before at Vaisala thereby shortening production lead times and improving productivity.
Vaisala, listed on the NASDAQ OMX Helsinki, is a Finnish company that develops, manufactures and markets innovative products and services for environmental and industrial measurement. Vaisala selected the Andon by Pinja system for troubleshooting production disturbances and shortening disturbance times.
– We wanted to understand better why our operators’ work is interrupted or why they cannot complete it all at once. We strongly believe that making disturbances visible reduces the time used for them and helps address actual causes of problems more effectively, summarizes Vaisala’s Operations Development Manager Arto Puukko.
Another target was that the support request system would be easy to use, clear and transparent to the entire organization. Many solutions of varying types and levels were analyzed at the definition and planning stage of the project. One strong alternative was to continue the development of the existing system created in-house.
– However, we made another decision. We realized fairly soon that we don’t want to invest our own resources on this type of software development. We are concentrating very heavily on our own business and therefore needed a partner who could be easily trusted with the product development and maintenance of the support system.
Based on initial discussions, a test environment was built for Vaisala for trialing the system for a few months. When this experimentation showed that the features of the system fulfilled the needs, the purchasing decision was made in the spring 2019. In the deployment step, everything did not go as planned.
– Challenges were related to the system’s readiness to meet our needs. After the initial difficulties, we managed to put the development on the right track and have now been able to use the system as originally intended. The corrections and developments made have been in the right direction and continuously take the situation in the desired direction. The system was introduced to the entire organization in late 2019. According to first experiences, the system has turned out to be easy to use and visually clear. Making a support request is fast and effortless.
– Our target was not to acquire a single new system that makes our operators’ work more difficult. In this, we have succeeded as planned and, in fact, have been able to eliminate two old systems.
In the future, actual root causes of disturbances can be evaluated and analyzed better than before at Vaisala thereby shortening production lead times and improving productivity.
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Get production disruptions under control using the Andon method
Andon – production assistance request and reporting system
