42Q Enables Production Readiness to Double the Volume at Comet’s Penang Facility

Weir Minerals, a part of the Weir Group plc, is a global market leader in the supply of engineered solutions and aftermarket products to the mining industry. Their customers require fast order fulfillment lead times, which are met by manufacturing products as quickly as possible within their 12 core manufacturing plants.

Comet’s facility in Penang, Malaysia needed to double the production volume of matching networks within a period of six months. While the manufacturing process itself could support the increase, the manual data collection process had reached the limits of its capability. The company needed to increase efficiency, improve quality, enhance traceability and wanted a single source of truth for all manufacturing data. They decided to implement a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and eliminate all spreadsheet and paper based processes. They also wanted the system to seamlessly integrate with their ERP system and a variety of manufacturing equipment.

A global medical device manufacturer had been producing complex Class II medical devices for years, using 42Q as their MES. Now they faced the challenge of manufacturing high-volume Class III medical devices with complex, fully automated production lines. They feared that implementing advanced, high-volume automation using 42Q MES would require significant factory downtime. The new production lines required a high level of sophisticated automation and a manufacturing execution system that supported and seamlessly integrated with such systems.

Sanmina manufactures 250 million products per year. More of a challenge is that there are over 200,000 different top-level assemblies produced each year for 700 different OEM customers with up to 20,000 forecast changes per week. The OEMs operate in diverse industries including telecommunications, enterprise computing & storage, industrial and clean technology. A significant amount of production is for medical, aerospace and automotive products with strict regulatory requirements. The existing on-premise MES required significant maintenance and upgrade effort from the IT and operations teams. It was also limited in its ability to manage supply chains beyond the walls of each factory, and was not well suited for factory automation and other IIoT initiatives.