MICrostops
monitoring

The most effective system for monitoring production rates and downtime

0 %

stoppages reduction

according to our client

What are microstops and why are so important?

Microstops are unplanned machine stoppages that, depending on the individual plant approach, last up to 1 minute, 2 minutes, – 5 minutes, above this time such a stoppage qualifies as an unplanned stoppage. These are short-lived incidents, but if you count them over a shift, a week, or a month, you realize that they account for a large proportion of our production. These stoppages are playing a key role in hight volume industry such as FMCG where speed of production is a crucial factor accounting for a final result.

Is this improvement necessary to me?

You know your OEE but you haven`t good root causes analysis

You have identified production lines with the unknown and high number of stoppages

You work in a factory with implemented OEE but with no specialised software to analyse upcoming data

Why ANT Microstops monitoring?

We give you the numbers

0 %

stoppages reduction according to our client

0 %

increase in machine time

0 %

up to, OEE increase

Read an article:

ANT Microstops (production monitoring, performance) system on SMD (FMC), FMD, THP, and OTP in Tobacco factory

Proven AI
helps to deliver

ANT’s AI detects responsible machine in the line.

Registering each, even the shortest stop of the machine with its reason from PLC
Reading alarms from PLC
Algorithm assigns responsible machine if in the line

Real machine data for lean actions to stop the stops
Less time to manually report machine states by Operator
Deep analyses why machine looses its availability

How do we work?

In order to mitigate the number of microstops, the ANT team goes through 3 steps.

Identifying and naming microstops

to define microstops by machine.
to define the time between microstops and failures
to create a list of all possible microstops that can occur on a machine.

How to collect data?

The quickest way is to connect directly to a PLC driver – such a connection allows the ANT team to access data such as machine states, state times, failure codes, production, waste counters, and more. If the machine is older or not equipped with a PLC driver, our team can add an I/O communication module to fetch the information about machine states and times.

Without the possibility to identify alarm codes the operator will have a greater share of the process, as he or she will have to describe the condition from a list of the most common microsteps by hand, choosing premade code from the dictionary. The bottom line is that all this data is real, as it is collected directly from the machines.

The collected data from the PLC will bring a lot of alarm codes, which have to be grouped and assigned to specific microswitches which allow for
doing more precise analysis.

Analysis of the collected data:

Analyzing the operation of the line for a selected period of time – the range is arbitrary (shift/day/week/year), the manager can select the state of interest and, using the “drill down” method, get information about:

what was the cause of the microstop
how many microstops there were during a given order (number of occurrences)
what was their total time
what was the share of this condition in the entire production

In summary, with the right tools line manager can identify the dark area that causes microstops. By connecting directly to the machines, the system has real data about the times and causes of downtime. The operator can easily describe undescribed downtimes, and management has a lot of properly grouped data with which it can reduce or completely eliminate microstops. This is how we deal with the problem of microdowntime at our clients.