Mixed net brings smarts to factory floor

Big companies that make big products - the GMs, Dows and Boeings of the world - have worked for years toward better factory and back-office integration. But even smaller manufacturers are following this trend.

Lifetime Products in Clearfield, Utah, manufactures equipment for home basketball courts, as well as other sporting goods and furniture items, such as folding metal tables and chairs. The firm is no giant, with less than 1,200 employees in Utah and one plant in China. But the company is taking on some high-end network technologies to make its operations as efficient as possible. These include the basics, such as wiring manufacturing gear with Ethernet, and extending Wi-Fi, RFID and other newer technologies to the factory floor and warehouses.

Lifetime uses a variety of network technologies to tie its campus of 27 manufacturing, warehouse and distribution facilities to its data center, located in an office adjacent to the plants.

Laser cutters, stamp presses and other manufacturing equipment in the factories are hooked up with 100M bit/sec Ethernet, which lets production managers on the floor access CAD images over the LAN and transfer designs to machines in the plants.

This beats the previous sneaker-net method of transferring CAD files to machines, says John Bowden, Lifetime's CIO.

"We used to have an engineer design a part, then carry the plans out by floppy disk to the factory," he says. This created long paper trails "and big messes of floppy disks." Hooking the factory floor to Ethernet let the machines link into the company's product life-cycle management (PLM) system, which integrates the tracking of production with the CAD and other systems.

Wi-Fi is another network technology used to hook into bar-code scanners in the plants and RFID readers on forklifts.

"We're also moving toward what they call 'slap-and-ship,'" where pallets of products are "slapped" with RFID tags that contain information on contents, shipping instructions and other data, Bowden says. As part of this effort, forklifts are being outfitted with Wi-Fi-enabled tablet PCs with RFID readers. When a forklift moves a pallet, the action is recorded and sent to the database instantly, eliminating paperwork. This lets the company move almost twice as much inventory as before with fewer people over a shorter time, he says.

In addition to making its own internal operations more efficient, RFID is essential to Lifetime's relationship with Wal-Mart, which has a corporate mandate requiring RFID tags from all of its merchandise suppliers, Bowden adds.

Lifetime uses PLM software from Prometric, which is the same company that supplies the firm's CAD platform; these systems run on HP/Windows servers. The other large platform in the data center is a Foresight ERP system, which run on HP-UX servers. All of Lifetime's servers connect to one HP ProCurve 9300 series switch in the data center via Gigabit links and multi-Gigabit trunks. Since introducing these platforms - which digitize many transactions that were paper-based before - the firm's data has grown an average of 600M bytes per day.

"These systems manage our whole product life cycle from cradle to grave," Bowden says. "We can track a product, from an idea scratched on a napkin [which can be stored as a PDF file] all the way to procuring the building materials, to how that product is being built" and shipped, he says.