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Smart Manufacturing Kaizen Level - Your guide to digital manufacturing success

SMKL (Smart Manufacturing Kaizen Level) is an evaluation index of the level of data utilisation in factories. It can help you make investment decisions by showing the purpose, impact, and relationship between each investment step to make your factory smarter and more efficient.

Main factors for advanced digital manufacturing

SMKL evaluates how advanced a company's digital manufacturing level is by looking at two main factors, one is the Maturity Level and the other is the Management Level.

Together, these two axes provide a comprehensive evaluation of digital manufacturing capabilities, highlighting both the technical advancement and the management's effectiveness in implementing and using digital manufacturing technologies.

Maturity Level - The level of visibility

The level of data visibility is represented by the maturity level, shown on the vertical axes of the SMKL model.

Level A is defined as “Data collection” 

Level B as “Visualization”

Level C as “Analysis” 

and Level D as “Optimization”.

Management Level - The granularity of the items to be managed

The horizontal axes represents the granularity, or level of detail for the items to be managed.

Level 1 is defined as the company’s “Worker”

Level 2 as “Workplace”

Level 3 as “Factory” and Level 4 as “Whole supply chain”.

The value of SMKL

  • Start “smartification” from the most appropriate point according to the current level and goals of each factory
  • The modular approach lets you carry out “smartification” step by step
  • Calculating and measuring the ROI achieved at each step is essential for investment decisions
  • Optimisation can occur at every level, all the way up to the entire factory and the whole supply chain, leading to significant business improvements (tackling a variety of management issues)

The main chances of SMKL

SMKL offers two key benefits for your digital manufacturing business: reducing costs and increasing productivity. By identifying, and visualising issues in the manufacturing processes and optimising those the SMKL strategy leads the way to a smarter factory.

Results of performing visualised operations

Overall production efficiency increased by 30%.

  • Training time for workers reduced by 65%
  • 18% faster production switchover between models
  • Assembly time reduced by 12% on average

Issue

Low production efficiency and uncontrollable cost management

  • Work speed and errors vary depending on the worker
  • Cannot tell which worker is making a mistake and how often

Implementation

Introduce support tools for the assembly process to the workplace

  • Demonstrate the procedure
  • Collect and analyze data on working hours and mistakes

Improvements

Significant cost reductions by improving worker efficiency through minimizing operational mistakes

  • Increased workers’ productivity through faster processing with less assembly errors
  • Understand the work status of all workers, identify common mistakes which require process or design correction and who needs retraining
  • Reduce unnecessary actions and redundant checking

Based on this result, we will realize overall cost reduction by expanding the investment target to the entire factory.

Results of SMKL energy saving measures

Energy saving approx. 4588,80 euro/year.

  • Investment amount (for system introduction): 11472,00 Euro.
  • Payback less than 30 months.

Issue

High power consumption and running costs

  • Cannot grasp the power consumption of each line and/or facility
  • Cannot identify where the waste is occurring

Implementation

Measure energy use on each line and piece of equipment, and visualize on a dashboard

Improvements

Successful control of energy consumption

  • Able to identify and analyze machines/locations with higher than expected energy consumption
  • Allows additional general control measures to be implemented at a machine or line level, with added flexibility to take temporary pre-emptive actions during fault conditions until the situation is corrected

Based on this result, an overall cost reduction was achieved. The change will now be applied to the entire factory.

You want to know more? Download our white paper below

Curious about SMKL and Smart Manufacturing? Discover more with our detailed white paper for an in-depth look at these exciting topics. Register below to download the free white paper and explore further how SMKL could impact your business.

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