MERLIN can help you with your personnel challenges

Summary

How MERLIN can boost production without straining your human resources

It is a common complaint that personnel shortage impedes operations significantly.
Retirement transitions tribal knowledge out of the company. The loss of tribal knowledge disrupts operations.
Personnel leaving for other positions. Whether the personnel are team members with time vested in the company or relatively new hires transitioning through your company, both wreak havoc on maintaining a competent workforce on the shop floor.

Everyone would agree that there is a dramatic shortage of skilled labour in the current market. Operators with experience in machining, setup, inspection, tooling, etc., are hard to come by, and poaching other companies’ personnel becomes commonplace.
The critical challenge is that the availability of skilled labour is shrinking, and the availability of experienced management, engineering, and QC technicians is not keeping pace with demand.
What technologies exist today to help reduce your reliance on human resources? New machinery and automation, including robotics, can drive unattended manufacturing where it makes sense. Augmented reality can drastically reduce dependence on skilled labour in assembly and fabrication work-centers. New CI tools can minimize reliance on engineering expertise to drive manufacturing efficiencies, throughput, quality, and delivery.

Aside from the cost, the challenge to adopting and implementing new technologies is the ability to assess its successes to qualify for wholesale adoption.
How does MERLIN help to mitigate these critical challenges? MERLIN connects all operations on the shop floor. Machines, cells, FMS systems, production lines, fabrication cells and work centers. It connects and enables operators, supervision, management, engineering, and QC through unencumbering technologies. It adds value without impact to strained resources.
It provides targeted feedback on constrained resources so you can focus your limited human resources on the most beneficial corrective action. In addition, MERLIN provides real-time alerting to emerging trends and disruptive events so that you can effectively marshal your people.
MERLIN provides product-specific work instructions for operators at the machine where they need them. Access to up-to-date, accurate electronic instructions generated by any world-class documentation system and routed by MERLIN. Such documents as work instructions and drawings.
MERLIN provides ongoing feedback through checklists to guarantee adherence to procedures. MERLIN partners with and integrates Augmented Reality systems like Arkite to provide operator guidance systems, electronic guided training, QC process adherence, reducing assembly errors, enforcing procedures, and instructing new personnel through integrated partnerships.
MERLIN provides critical operational, maintenance, and quality metrics to baseline and milestone your improvement initiatives.
Through innovative continuous improvement tools, your engineering and QC teams can do and achieve far more with fewer personnel.
All levels within the organization have accurate shop floor information through the automated generation and delivery of critical operational reports.
MERLIN support “lights out” production by monitoring and alerting key personnel to any deviation from the operational process. MERLIN can monitor and respond to issues in complex flexible manufacturing systems, nested lasers, multi-axis machines, welders, robotics, and any other processes on the shop floor.
MERLIN can assist in validating new processes and introducing new machines, equipment, and follow-on automation, catching unseen anomalies before they are adopted as part of everyday work. In addition, MERLIN can provide rapid feedback to determine if the planned output matches the actual output.
MERLIN supports integration to your ERP system for pushing work orders, jobs, and product standards into the MERLIN for accurate job tracking on the shop floor. In addition, metrics can be used to calculate capacity availability to validate scheduling and resource planning.
The critical data from MERLIN will provide value in production-costing by identifying lost production dollars and poor performance and utilization.

MERLIN comes as a fixed-price project with rapid deliverables and unlimited user configurations to support how you do business. In addition, MERLIN can be rapidly deployed for quick ROI.
For the foreseeable future, we will experience human resource shortages. You can leverage the most out of your personnel by employing MERLIN without adding stress. You will foster a team approach with healthy competition. In addition, MERLIN will provide a skill-levelling process by which you can improve throughput and quality even in the face of human resource challenges.