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Boise Wood Products Deploys FactoryWidgets® Software For Desktop Display of Manufacturing KPIs for ‘Casual’ Users

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Elgin, Oregon – In an ideal world, the most efficient companies would be the ones in which people have all the information they need to do their jobs right at their fingertips. In the manufacturing world, however, this isn’t easy or inexpensive to accomplish. There has always been a tradeoff between the cost of providing real time information and the savings that can be realized from doing so.

FactoryWidgets on Scott Noble’s desktop help him stay on top of production KPI’s from board stacker loads, to curing temperatures, to environmental pollution control parameters.

Until now, as production staff has discovered at Boise Cascade’s Wood Products complex here in northeastern Oregon, there now is a way to provide real-time production information to casual users throughout the plant who need to monitor processes and respond to alerts if something goes awry. Their solution is the FactoryWidgets™ software package developed by Apex Software Development, a division of Apex Manufacturing Solutions in Boise, ID, and sold by Software Toolbox in Charlotte, NC.

Most people are familiar with Boise Cascade LLC as a leading maker of engineered wood products for the building industries. The two mills at the Elgin Complex produce plywood and lumber and share certain sawmill operations for the early stages of making the two different categories of products. The FactoryWidgets give Elgin staff an unobtrusive reporting mechanism that provides low cost, easy to use and high performance data display objects for viewing and monitoring manufacturing data on desktops by personnel anywhere in the company.

The “widgets” are simple, no-hassle and affordable mini-applications that display user-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) on desktop PCs without the need for “thick” client software or even an Internet browser. They work just like the Windows “gadget” technology (compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and 7 desktop operating systems) with which users can place intelligent icons on their screens to monitor weather or track stocks, but are for viewing manufacturing KPIs. They enable any personnel to monitor activities that impact the work they’re doing in order to help make the plant run better.

The widgets can be placed or dragged anywhere on user screens to display essential manufacturing information as easy-to-read, up-to-the-minute status information for a broad range of indicators – from production rates and profitability to overall equipment effectiveness, energy usage, production yields, work order completion and many other critical data elements that people may want to see.

They are user-configurable in different colors and with customizable text to match the individual user’s needs and they can be set up with on-screen translucency so they aren’t obtrusive while people are doing other work. When target thresholds are reached, however, their behavior is easily noticed. Hovering a mouse over the FactoryWidget brings it into “focus” for direct interaction. They can be configured so that clicking on them links users to more detailed information that they usually may only have access to in a browser – such as a report generated by a historian or an information server – and users don’t need to close or minimize other applications to use the widgets.

 “We started using this solution in the first quarter of this year and we already have it on virtually all of our plant managers’ and supervisors’ desktops,” said Scott Noble, Computer Controls Specialist who is responsible for maintaining machine center controls, the mill-wide database and coordination of the plant’s local environmental program. “We started with the superintendents of our sawmill and plywood plants, then added the production manager, who has primary responsibility for the entire complex, and moved out from there.”

FactoryWidgets enable any personnel to monitor on their desktop activities that impact the work they’re doing in order to help make the plant run better.

The variety of information that’s now available to people has grown quickly and ranges from simple indicators – such as whether the dryer on the plywood line is running or not – to more complex procedures such as tracking the vat conditioning temperatures required for pre-treating wood prior to peeling veneers.

“Our sawmill maintenance supervisor uses the FactoryWidgets for environmental monitoring as well,” Noble added. “He now can easily monitor our pollution control system for both the temperatures in the boiler as well as opacity of the plume. We already had automatic alarms in place to send text messages and emails to let everyone know when we’re in a condition that needs to be addressed before an upset occurs – but the widgets just fit the bill for him. Now when he gets a text message that he needs to do something, he can take a quick look right on his desktop to tell if we’ve exceeded a parameter and he can quickly access  information that he can use to start investigating what’s going on.”

Perhaps the biggest user is Noble himself. “Right now I have about 15 widgets on my desktop, all on one side of my screen so I can just scroll through them as needed,” he explained. “I can tell a lot from even some simple timers that help us optimize our production.  For example, we have a proximity switch that can tell us when we have a log in one of our barkers. By simply timing when that is closed I can get a rough idea of how much time there’s actually a log being barked during each shift. This has been a real eye opener for folks because we learned we really only have a log in the barker for a little over 50-55 percent of the time.”

The ultimate goal is to get production rates higher, and the new information provided via the  FactoryWidgets has enabled improvements without having to replace the legacy control and automation systems in place at the Elgin complex, instead leveraging what they already have through pulling from existing Wonderware data sources and using the click-through capability of the FactoryWidgets to pull up existing Wonderware reports and dashboards.

 “The widgets have given us a real-time view of what’s happening, as it occurs, which we’ve never had before,” he noted. “Most of our operators haven’t had any information at all on what’s going on. It’s difficult for them to understand where the constraints are in the process if they’re just feeding stems into the barker, for example. To get this information in front of them so barker operators themselves can actually see that they may only have had stems in the barker for a total of two hours and 54 minutes today, makes them more aware of how the system’s working and what it should be doing. With this kind of information they can focus on optimizing the system and using it to its full potential.”

Staff from Apex Manufacturing Solutions are also helping Noble develop an hour-by-hour production target monitor that will provide visibility into actual results for each hour of each shift. “We’ll be able to view each hour’s production as a percentage of the total shift goal so that we can see where we are on the day’s production as it’s occurring,” he explained. “This can really be valuable to us as we approach the end of a shift because we’ll now have an indication of whether we can hit the total target in the remaining shift time available. That can be helpful in determining if we even have the capacity to hit the shift goal and whether that might impact meeting customer orders.”

The low cost and high performance of the FactoryWidgets solution has really motivated the Elgin staff and people are now looking for all kinds of simplified ways to get information on their screens.

“This simply hadn’t been possible before because we usually were approached by an OEM or someone with a new way of visualizing what’s going on out there – but they wanted a quarter of a million dollars to buy it and we would have had to hire and train new development people,” Noble said. “With this low cost solution that’s easy to install and use, we can customize and configure it ourselves and just plop it out in front of folks. The WidgetServer™ was easy to install on our existing server hardware and we just add seats as we need them.”

And the system has generated a return-on-investment right from the start – including saving an environmental upset within minutes of its installation.

“We had literally just installed the FactoryWidgets on our saw mill maintenance supervisor’s desktop, in his office that looks out over the sawmill and the boiler stacks,” Noble explained. “One of the first things he said he wanted to see in a widget was boiler opacity because he’s one of the people who gets an  email or text message if something goes out of bounds. Within minutes after we set him up, boom, his phone beeped and his email popped up that he had an air upset condition.

“The FactoryWidget had turned red, showing that our opacity was 27%, so we were in an upset condition,” he said. “He knew right then exactly what the numbers were and could see a little haze outside his window. He quickly called the operator and got the precise data he needed and then notified the state. Previously he would have had to stop what he was doing, open a terminal services window into another system and launch another application that had a saved trend in order to see what the opacity value was, when it occurred and get all the detail he needed to report.  The FactoryWidget saved him 10 minutes of his time, which could be a terrible delay in some environmental situations. He was just ecstatic.”

What’s next for the FactoryWidgets application? Local plant staffs aren’t the only ones who’ll benefit from using them, Noble concluded. The next group to get the solution will be staff members at the regional offices down the road in La Grande, OR. Not only will production management be better able to see real-time operations information, the environmental monitoring and reporting staff will similarly be able to track conditions at the remote site.

“This will give everyone a quick peek at what’s going on so they can better track and respond to any production operation or environmental issues,” Noble said. “One of the best benefits is this makes my life easier in maintenance and support because users can do it themselves.