Overview

The GearBOX^TM is a technology that ensures product quality, products shipped in sequence, and customer satisfaction. It is also a technology that provides a non-intrusive approach to transferring data between shop floor and business systems to optimize plant performance.

In today’s competitive environment, manufacturers cannot afford to ship defective products. Customer’s quality standards are higher than ever – there is no tolerance for defects. Continued or future business depends on meeting customer’s growing expectations for quality.

Likewise, critical performance data must be captured in a manner that does not impact production or operator efficiency. As companies strive to take costs out of the business equation, real-time data must be readily available for fact-based decision-making.

Meeting the customer’s mandate for quality and capturing critical performance data is complicated by the fact that manufacturers must also deal with the following issues:

• Equipment and processes that are always changing
• The growing number of products to produce – more product variation
• Employees are only human – they sometimes make mistakes
• Increased reporting requirements to fully document quality – audit trail
• Products must be built and shipped in sequence, to broadcasts

The GearBOX is a major enabler to achieve world-class product quality. It incorporates proactive measures to ensure product quality by preventing process errors from occurring. The GearBOX helps people do their job by providing real-time operator guidance and step-by-step instructions. Should mistakes be made or processes bypassed, the GearBOX prevents products, with defects, from advancing downstream. In addition, the GearBOX creates a permanent audit trail of the manufacturing process to document quality and provides a means of collecting and sharing pertinent performance data.

The GearBOX offers many benefits to companies implementing “active prevention” or error-proofing solutions. Active prevention is differentiated from “passive prevention” in the sense that it is a strategy, which prevents the introduction of an error to a system or immediately recognizes the introduction. Passive prevention systems include things like documentation of best practices, checklists for recommended or required tasks, and process maps, which provide diagrams of typical tasks or workflow. Passive prevention measures can only take a corporate quality initiative so far – it fundamentally relies on operators to never make mistakes or omit steps.

What makes the GearBOX unique in the active prevention – error-proofing market is the following:

• Non-intrusive approach does not void equipment warranties.
• Modular Configuration – provides flexible and quick connectivity to a wide range of technologies and systems. Built-in application libraries make the GearBOX simple to install and quick to deploy.
• Visual Alert System – provides immediate operator feedback through stack lights and message displays. Exception logs, traceability information and production reporting of key performance measures can be presented via the web.

These same product features are benefits to utilizing the GearBOX for data collection purposes as well as the integration of business systems with shop-floor systems for the purpose of building products to a broadcast or schedule.