AMF Site Visit to Rolls Royce, Washington
Join us for our June monthly meeting taking place at Rolls Royce, Washington.
The 18,000 sq ft plant manufactures discs for a variety of Trent engines, taking a moulded alloy and machining slots along the edges with a “fir tree” design so that turbine blades can then be slotted in. Each disc needs to be machined and treated precisely, to withstand the heat and pressures inside an engine, and also to ensure the blades stay exactly in place, given that the forces on that fir tree slot can be about 100 tons or the equivalent of hanging a freight train off each blade.
Production intelligence
With each disc costing up to £100,000 and a challenging production schedule that demands 2,500 of them are produced each year, it’s vital to know exactly where each and every one of those discs is, and where it stands in the process, to maximise the production flow.
Despite being up to 160kg in weight and as wide as a car tyre, it is still surprisingly easy for a part to go “missing” if it is sent back through the production process for additional work and has to take its place in the queue along with the rest of the workstream.
That’s where Production Intelligence comes in. Each disc now has its own router with its own part number, sending out a signal 24/7 that connects it with a GPS map of the plant. If any production leader needs to know exactly where a part is, they can log into a specialist app on their phone – and find out where it is.
At the site’s central hub, production leaders can take that information a lot further. All those transponder signals are shown on one large screen, displaying a wealth of data on each disc’s status – how long it has remained stationary in the system, how it stands against its production dispatch target (it typically takes 4-6 weeks for a disc to make it through the entire system), and engineers can tag on their own comments about any issues that may be hindering progress.
Which means team leaders at the hub can then see the overall picture and prioritise the order in which discs are machined.
