Find Your "Hidden Factory"
Apex can help you optimize your operation through measuring OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and downtime tracking. One way to increase your factory's capacity is to purchase new equipment and hire new employees. Another way is to find exactly how your existing equipment is losing production time and make improvements. Typically it will only cost you a tenth as much to leverage your existing capacity compared to purchasing new equipment and adding staff. If you don't have an OEE system already, Apex can typically find an additional 10 to 30 percent capacity.

Our approach is to use the steps of constraint management methodology described by Eliyahu Goldratt in his ground-breaking book Critical Chain.
1. Find the bottleneck (Identify)
2. Focus resources on the bottleneck (Exploit)
3. Other areas of the plant should be informed and serve the bottleneck (Subordinate)
4. Incorporate all necessary changes for high OEE on the bottleneck (Elevate)
5. Find the next bottleneck (Go Back)

The Wonderware Advantage
Apex is a leading-edge developer of Wonderware Production and Performance management solutions. Our typical approach is to run a factory ethernet network through each critical machine in your operation. Then we start a comprehensive log of operational events. When does the operator start and stop the machine and why? At what percent of capacity does the machine run? Once we start logging this data, we generate performance dashboards, reports and alarms for maintenance and production.

Performance Dashboards	Reports	Alarms

The Move to Predictive Maintenance
Many manufacturers employ very good practices of Preventative Maintenance (PM). Using PM, manufacturers replace and service machinery based on elapsed time or an hour count. Apex can implement systems to automatically track machinery usage and generate work orders for your maintenance department.

Apex can also use Predictive Maintenance (PdM) techniques. This involves using software to look at motor currents, temperature, and pressures to predict when a part failure may occur. This allows your maintenance department to fix a problem during non-production times.

Apex has the complete solution to your production problems. We know how to find bottlenecks and when we find them, we are experts in PLC programming and robotics and can quickly get your line functioning as smoothly as possible.