Tracking & Traceability

Increased Production Insight from Full Production Life-Cycle Visibility

The Argonaut platform, built around a mature Traceability capability and complemented by a full spectrum feature set of our mature, advanced MES system, provides your organization visibility into the full life-cycle of your production processes.  Each final assembly shipped to your customer will include a comprehensive genealogy of its entire build in the form of a portable “Birth Certificate” document. 

From the moment that a part is introduced to production at your manufacturing facility, Argonaut’s Track & Trace module will collect operator security badge authentication, automatic process data points, manual operator approvals and decisions, as well as controls system and tool process data.

Improved Automated and Operator Decision Making in Real-Time

Argonaut’s Track & Trace feature offers production the immediate value of real-time, actionable information about each part as it moves through the production process.  As the part progresses through production, each operation has full visibility of all data collected at any point upstream of that operation. 

Fully automated production processes can reference all upstream data and leverage Argonaut’s advanced “Smart System” process configurations to automatically make run-time production routing and decisions. 

Quality controls can easily be built into your production systems using upstream traceability data to enforce strict “quality gates” and process interlocks to assure quality throughout your value stream.  Integrated quality assurance is the cheapest and most efficient strategy for building an effective quality framework into your production processes.

In addition to integrating real-time decision making into your automated processes, the Argonaut platform includes fully-featured Operator Instruction and Guided Manufacturing capabilities that can present operators with the same level of upstream production insight and allow operators to manually guide the part through production.

Quick Return-On-Investment from Reduced Waste and Increased Efficiencies

Production datasets produced by the Argonaut Track & Trace application and especially datasets that represent high-volume production operations, provide compounding insight into which operations generate the highest failure rates, resulting in costly scrap and waste.  Leveraging the same production datasets also provide visibility into which operations consistently lead the line in terms of cycle time or TAKT time overruns.

The power of Argonaut’s Track & Trace application and Argonaut as an advanced MES platform is that these production insights are available in near real-time.  As a standard feature, Argonaut leverages traceability data combined with powerful reporting and dashboard features to provide immediate insight into production bottlenecks and fault reporting at the operation and line level. 

Your production supervisor team will understand where your production constraints are and through advanced constraint analysis can focus on mitigation of your production constraints, resulting in increased throughput and more quality parts being produced at a lower cost to you.          

Your investment in implementing traceability into your manufacturing value stream will quickly have a positive, financially tangible impact on your production operations and transformation into a lean and efficient system and support constant improvement in the future.  

Private Sector and Government Customer Specification and Reporting Compliance

Both public sector (government) and OEM private sector customers have well defined production specifications and require strict production reporting parameters be met in order to ensure quality.  These strict reporting requirements also minimize the cost and effort of executing product recalls. 

The Argonaut Track & Trace application allows your organization to confidently attract high-value customers with the advantage of meeting strict traceability requirements and a mature framework for ensuring quality and operational efficiencies.  Your organization’s ability to demonstrate a focus on quality and efficiency, built on a foundation of a comprehensive traceability solution, will significantly increase your competitiveness in winning new business.

Once prospects become customers, your ability to continuously improve your operations, minimize production costs and identify, isolate, and mitigate quality issues quickly will result in more profitable production and higher customer satisfaction and confidence in your organization.   

Advanced Analytics Enable Machine Learning and Industry 4.0

Over the last decade, all sectors within the manufacturing industry are adopting the maturing initiatives of a full digitalization and system integration throughout the production process.  These initiatives are collectively grouped under the umbrella of Industry 4.0, which over the last 10 years have evolved from a loosely-grouping of concepts into a cohesive framework that continues to guide manufacturing into the next generations of efficiency and automation.  Many organizations have already adopted Machine Learning and reaped the real value of real-time production data in automating decision making, increasing quality and driving defects and waste out of their production process.

The Argonaut platform’s Track & Trace application provides your organization a firm foundation of digitalized data representing a full-spectrum view into your production operations.  In addition to Argonaut’s Track & Trace features and ability to aggregate valuable datasets, our platform offers an architecture that makes system integrations easy and enables Industry 4.0 concepts.

Tangible Reduction in Warranty and Recall Expenses

One of the biggest challenges that your customers will experience, and depend on your organization to support, is the expense and effort of executing a product recall.  Product recalls have traditionally been very costly and damaging to OEMs but also highly impactful to upstream suppliers.  Your organization’s response to a recall can be detrimental to your reputation if not executed effectively.  Alternatively, as a supplier implementing a powerful MES solution leveraging traceability, a positive and effective recall response will bolster your reputation and brand as a reliable partner in the industry.