Silae Product Framework
Silae Platform Framework and Philosophy
What is Silae?
Silae Conceptual Framework
Silae Design Philosophy
Industry 4.0 Aligned
What is Silaé?
Silaé™ is an Industry 4.0 platform for improving productivity of apparel manufacturing factories.
The key to the effectiveness of the Silaé™ platform is that it is designed specifically for the apparel manufacturing facilities of emerging markets. The platform uses modern and innovative technologies yet stays familiar for the users.
The core design elements of the platform are to free up the shop floor managers from grunt work and amplify their ability to manage and improve their operations. It is designed with specific consideration of the geographical locations, skill levels, digital literacy and existing production model of the factories.
It is easy for you to start small and to organically expand. Our customers love this because expanding is both comfortable and safe. Your upfront commitment is minimal – especially since we encourage every new client to start with a pilot installation. Simply start with a pilot, expand to one floor, expand to one factory, and then add more factories as time and resources permit. All in your timeframe – not ours.
As you add more Silaé™ devices, they communicate with each other using our proprietary technology, to provide you with complete information and integrated reporting for each machine, line, floor, and factory. You can access the reports and analysis using cloud services anytime, annywhere for an integrated experience.
It is easy for your team to adopt and use as it fits in existing ways of working. This makes floor staff into allies instead of opponents, as they see how Silae helps them simplify their existing workload.
It is easy to get people trained on using the solution - critical for an industry that sees a lot of worker churn.
It makes managing factories easy as it automates the most difficult element - data collection. It provides rich insights for management in real-time so they can take timely actions.
Silae Conceptual Framework
SILAE IS DESIGNED TO LET FACTORIES ADOPT INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING GOLD STANDARDS WITHOUT CHANGING THEIR EXISTING PROCESSES
OEE (Recording efficiency)
OEE is the gold standard and globally accepted productivity framework. In essence, OEE is how efficient a factory operates compared to its full potential capacity: producing only good pieces, as fast as possible, with no stop time
OEE Analysis
OEE analysis requires primarily 5 data points
Planned Production Time
Stop Time
Ideal Cycle Time
Total Count
Good Count
How Silae brings OEE to your factory floor
Silae draws from OEE and makes it accessible to the production floor without the need to know the theoretical framework. Production floor continues to work the way they do and continues to use the same terms and metrics that they are used to.
Silae’s powerful cloud engine does all the work in the background and masks the complexity.
Instant actionable insights in mobile app for operational decision making.
Data Feeds to automate report generation for Tactical weekly production review meetings or Strategic monthly production review meetings or other purposes.
Silae translates all collected data to actionable terms that production floor supervisors understand:
Target: a real-time production target driven by the planned rate of production
Actual: the actual production count
Efficiency: the ratio of Target to Actual
Loss Time: accumulated unplanned stop time for the shift
SMED (Improving efficiency)
One of the emerging requirements to stay competitive is to be profitable with smaller lot sizes. This requires factories to eliminate all wastes from their changeover times.
The gold standard for reduction of changeover times is SMED. Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) is a method used to minimize changeover losses. The essence of the SMED system is to convert as many changeover steps as possible to “external” (performed while the system is running), and to simplify and streamline the remaining steps.
Silae provides a mobile based interface that helps minimize the time taken for changeovers. The app allows Industrial Engineers to plan changeovers in advance, and provides easy ways to configure lines, machines and employees for changeovers.
Silae also provides real-time insights about the factory floor that lets management study changeovers and plan better.
Theory of Constraints (Eliminate Bottlenecks)
The core concept of the Theory of Constraints is that every process has a single constraint and that total process throughput can only be improved when the constraint is improved.
A very important corollary to this is that spending time optimizing non-constraints will not provide significant benefits; only improvements to the constraint will further the goal (achieving more profit).
Silae is designed to provide precise and sustained focus on improving the current bottleneck (constraint) in real-time until it no longer limits throughput, at which point the focus moves to the next bottleneck (constraint).
Silae design includes a problem solving methodology called the Thinking Processes. Once a bottleneck is identified, Silae delivers insights to answer the following three questions:
What needs to be changed?
What should it be changed to?
What actions will cause the change?
Kaizen Process (Win Every Minute)
Short Interval Control (SIC) is a structured process for identifying and acting on opportunities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of production.
It is a factory-floor process that engages team members to review performance data three or four times within their shift to assess where they need to focus their efforts to improve performance.
A key feature of SIC is the use of real-time production data to guide instantaneous front-line decision-making.
Silae auto collects and performs analysis on the data so that teams focus is on reacting to this data and drive significant performance improvement from the factory floor. The information in easy to consume formats for different roles, enabling easy collaboration.
Kanban (Shared visibility)
Visibility is one of the most important catalysts to drive continuous improvement. If everyone is able to see the process, it provides everyone, from factory floor contributors to senior management, with a shared, true understanding of capacity, productivity and process efficiency.
Kanban is the gold standard of visual project management that leverages on the human brain’s preference for visual content over written content.
Silae’s kanban inspired mobile apps help teams understand and analyze what really happens in their work in real time.
Instead of reading a written report about how the team is doing, they can visualize workflow better through a Kanban board.
Silae Design Philosophy
There are enough examples of high-tech tools that promise benefits of technology, but never get adopted on the factory floor. Most of these fail because they require users to leave their comfort zones and adapt to a new way of working.
At Silae, we strongly believe that technology should assist users in their current roles by adapting to how they work, rather than the other way around.
Silae has been designed after years of observation of factory floor processes. The factory floor is abuzz with activity. Unlike most other industries, there is a lot of variability in products being manufactured, operation bulletins and even skills.
We have factored practical realities of factory operations in our design:
