One of the reasons that we really need that and we paid a small premium for it was because the cycle of our products is really short. The third thing we did, was make sure that there was enough flexibility in the line itself so we could reconfigure the line anytime we wanted to. I can take one and move it to another line. Another thing was the test stations are all modular. One was, we wanted to get the conveyor line off the floor because of the traffic flow. "Working with our subcontractor, we had to develop solutions to the things we wanted to accomplish. So the unit on the pallet has its own power connector and it just snaps in every test station along the line." By going to the conveyor system we eliminated ever having to take the unit off the conveyor because one of the things we incorporated in this system was a special power pallet. Then it would come out and it would go to the quality control station. They would put it back on the line and move to the next place to do a burn-in. Then they would go to a test station and testing. "Before the system, the boxes would come along to a certain point on the conveyor line and the people would have to physically pick it up and move it or we had a crane pick them up.
Also, it's the way of the future and we wanted to go with it." A third thing was, we knew we were going to increase our production by 3 times. The other thing was we needed some type of automation because of the amount of information we had to handle.
Over a period of a day they may lift 100 to 200 systems and sometimes they weigh 40 lbs. One was that the boxes were getting heavier so we had safety concerns with the employees lifting the boxes many times. This was helpful for a couple of reasons. One of the advantages that we came across when we decided to go with a conveyor system was reducing the amount of handling that the people actually did.
Sgi computer cases manual#
low-end building and they are doing three times the number of boxes as before.Īccording to Jim Mullen at Silicon Graphics, "We used to be a very labor intensive organization and there was a lot of manual handling. Now the two are combined in the 100,000 sq. It's interesting to note that prior to this the low-end and high-end units were produced in separate buildings totaling 165,000 square feet. The system also had to be able to adapt quickly to new models. All of these had to be produced in the same system. Silicon Graphics produces a large variety of high-end and low-end computers.
To maintain high output with their increasing growth was important at Silicon Graphics but one of the requirements here was to maintain a high degree of flexibility during the automation process. Silicon Graphics increases control and maintains flexibility
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