Introduction

In modern production environments, lean manufacturing and logistics have been long accepted as best practice. The efficiency of production processes and the related logistics is key to a corporate’s ability to deliver the profitability performance required by markets today.
Over the last decade, firms have been investing heavily into Information Technologies, which enable management to control factory processes, identify bottlenecks and increase both process effectiveness and efficiency.
The main lesson from the Total Quality Management movement (TQM) of the 80’s is well learned in today’s modern lean enterprise: Dr. Philip Crosby, one of the fathers of the TQM movement, argued that an investment in prevention pays off because it drastically reduces the cost of inspection and the number of process failures. 
Prevention is always the preferred strategy! Companies should strive to install processes that ensure nonconforming events can not occur or, if they happen, they can be immediately identified and corrected before they turn into “defects”. Quality should be designed in. Processes need to be designed so that they are less likely to generate errors.
This notion is at the core of Parelec’s product offering. Analyzing the IT investments of a typical manufacturing firm, it is evident that the majority of systems in place target only post-event information, derived from the warehouse or the production floor environment.
The iLocate system is set to change this situation. By enabling warehouse location and real time, automated process monitoring, the iLocate introduces error prevention methodologies into the factory’s production and logistics environments. Building quality into processes is at the core of the iLocate applicative design – Keeping always in mind that it is far simpler to prevent errors from happening then to correct them once they already occurred.

Process errors or “defects” can occur for different reasons. Some of them are related to human errors; others to human’s being reluctant or simply neglecting their duty. Sometimes errors just happen because of a combination of circumstances. All the same, it is a game of prevention, real time monitoring and control. This is where Parelec’s Smart Agent active tag product family steps into the picture. The vision is simple – attaching Smart Agents to a process’s critical assets, ordering them to monitor and report the data collected, in real time, to the center.
24 hours on alert, the smart agent tags monitor events in the field, receive commands and execute them, and transmit their location for access control automation and quick find-and-fetch operations.
It is here where technology steps into the game field - to compensate human errors and substitute human reluctance when it occurs.

Those are some of the attached benefits for fleet managers and vehicle yards:

True Asset Utilization Visibility:

• The system can monitor asset’s utilization – such as a forklift’s route, time per route and total usage. Such information can be used to optimize warehouse & yard structure and to eliminate asset overhead.

Always updated, real time yard inventory

• Eliminating the avg. 7% of “lost” inventories.
• No human inspection costs, no human data registry errors.

Pallet location in the warehouse

• Cutting inventory search time
• Preventing wrong storage-spot warehousing and fetching of the wrong items. 

Remote data collection

• Automated data collection and central data storage

Enhanced security and safety

• Every forklift movement is monitored. Alarm can be automatically generated

Short-range employee tags associated with vehicle’s Smart Agent

• Who drove the forklift and when is always registered to increase employee accountability and thus performance and responsibility.

Please visit the downloads area for further details on available solutions and Manufacturing and Logistics application white paper download.