Silaé™ Cloud Platform

Silae Cloud Platform

Digital Twins

Silaé creates digital twins of a garment factory in the cloud by mapping physical elements of the production floor to digital elements.

Silaé™ cloud data platform aggregates the incoming data and processes to create the virtual shop floor. The actual production shop floor data is received, analyzed and is used to generate a range of metrics, KPIs, alerts and events to trigger generation and delivery of insights to various stakeholders via apps and data feeds.

These digital elements are then supplemented with process flows and routing plans that are replicas of the physical factory floor activities. The physical world and the digital world are then interconnected by sensors that capture activities at a granular level and transmit to the digital world.

Silae Digital Twins provide instant access to business critical data

Loss Time Monitoring

Throughput Monitoring

Quality Monitoring

Skill Monitoring

Throughput Monitoring: How Silae Monitors Throughput

On production shop-floor, management decisions are guided by their effect on achieving the following improvements (in order of priority):

Will Throughput be increased?
Will Investment be reduced?
Will Operating Expenses be reduced?

Silaé is designed to serve all three objectives by bringing constant focus of the production floor on increasing Throughput while delivering necessary tools for cutting expenses.

Connected Materials Tell Their Own Story

Silaé enables the production floor to easily assign tracking cards to the materials and track them as they flow through the production process.

Bundle Tracking Cards

Reusable RFID cards to be assigned as tracking cards

Bundles Tagged with Tracking Cards

Easily start tracking bundles

Works for even most basic setup

Silae system has been successfully adopted even by factories that have no history of any prior automation.

Example Scenario:

Generally, the tracking points are configured at all handover points. An example of tracking scenario is as follows:

Cutting ready
Embroidery in
Embroidery out
Printing in
Printing out
Bundle ready to issue
Received inwards (for each line)
WIP (line feeding)
Stitching finished
Checking inwards
Ready for Inspection (End of Line)
EOL Inspection inwards
Ready for ironing
Unassign tracking card for reuse

At Silaé’s backend Cloud Servers, the tracking data is put in context of the processes (order, style, color, size, line etc) that are being run to generate rich insights on the flow smoothness and where bottlenecks are emerging.

The bottleneck or primary constraint. Silae system is designed to generate data to identify constantly moving bottlenecks or constraints in the production flow. The speed at which the primary bottleneck runs sets the speed for the entire production process and determines total throughput. These bottlenecks are easily visible using the Silaé™ App’s kanban cards and monitoring screens.

Monitor “Buffer” inventory level at each handover point to maintain consistent production. Silaé™ system captures real time and cumulative data at each point to ensure that brief interruptions and fluctuations in intermediate non-constraint points do not affect the bottleneck point.

Supervisors can monitor real time status and ensure that adequate work-in-process should arrive in advance of being used to ensure steady output of the line as per the target.

Along with real time information on the buffer, insights are delivered at the line planning state (the operation bulletins) to provision for additional sprint capacity (optional overcapacity) at non-constraints.

Generate signals at the bottleneck points to indicate that some amount of inventory has been consumed. This gives information to supervisors to trigger an identically sized release of inventory into the process. The end objective is to maintain throughput by ensuring constraint points are not running dry while at same time without creating an accumulation of excess inventory.

Skill Monitoring

Auto-Skill mapping of Operators

Skill mapping is a critical, yet expensive and inaccurate affair today. Typically, an employee’s skill is mapped by observing the output of a given operation over a defined time-period. Alternatively, skills are tracked by observing an operator’s performance in a line.

In the first case, this adds costs as time has to be set aside for an observation or mapping period in the first case. In case the factory has a lot of contractual labour, this is difficult to do. This also has a disadvantage of being a measure that’s locked in time. As the operator improves their skill, a change in grade occurs either by remapping the skill, or inputs from a supervisor.

In the second case, mapping skills during production comes at a cost of line efficiency. Floor management staff have to allocate the operator to a step, and depending on the relative performance of the operator, decide on skill levels.

Silae offers an alternative to these methods by automatically tracking performance of operators during their work without the need for an observer. All data related to the step, machine and output can be automatically mapped to an operator in real-time. Quality of the task can be measured with regular inspection methods by using Silae’s digital tools.

This provides a rich set of insights about operators at no additional effort. With Silae, your team can:

Automatically grade operators based on their performance
Quickly decide which operator suits the speed and quality requirement of a step
Build a skill map of operators across different operations

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