ICTS-Final Trial Run

Yesterday, we managed to do final trial run together with the contract workers to give them some feel of how this year production would looks like with the additional of the ICTS. Next, it also acts as our final analysis of what to do to improve the project so that some kaizen can be done. While this project is actually a manpower reduction project, it's intrinsict purpose is to slowly automate the process to reduce process tacttime as well as to reduce unnecessary proceses as well.
Since the packaging area has been accustomed to the traditional way of documenting and doing manual processing, the changing of the norm will have some resistance. In fact this is a normal and already expected as part of human nature.
In order to do fully automation, there are many more simple manual processes that have to be upgraded. However as for the time being, this ICTS will pioneer the kaizen activity that will stroll on in future. This ICTS will serve as example of how the rest of the process can be automated as well. While simplifying the processes automation also will lead to the decrease of the per unit cost of the mooncake.

Anyway, there are a few suggestions for ICTS improvement based on the trial run yesterday. They are :
1- The mooncake input to the conveyor system need improvement. Now everytime the operator put on 4 mooncakes he has to align them to the guide. While wasting time this job is actually unnecessary. The job can be eliminated if there is a better slider guide that allow the operator to simply insert the mooncake inside the slider tunnel where the alignment will be done by the slider itself. By doing this, only one operator is required to input rather than two for the time being. As for the design, the smoothness and the angle of the slider is very important where the gravity is the main force to pull the mooncake to the conveyor continuosly.
2- The sensors position between conveyor D and conveyor C, as well as conveyor C and conveyor B nned to be adjusted a bit to avoid collisions whenever the front conveyor stop.
3- The sensors S1 and S2 were a bit unreliable where sometimes the signal is not stable. When this thing happen, a collision in front of the pusher might happen causing mooncake damage. A solution could be changing to better sensor ssuch as keyence brand that cost more than RM500 aeach.
4. The switch box for START STOP and EMERGENCY needs to be install rather than switchews only for better access to the ICTS hardwires.

Meanwhile, since this year we are going to produce 4 colors (GREEN, PURPLE, PINK, BLACK) for snowy mooncakes, samples are needed ASAP to ensure that our existed sensors can work with them. Yet for small mooncakes, samples also needed ASAP as the alignment and ICTS adjustment are needed to ensure smooth operation of the machine.