The challenge facing Chief Information Officer Tony Malangone is the same one facing most manufacturers: balancing reduced manufacturing costs with high product quality and high customer service.
But the distinction is RTI International Metals Inc.’s approach to a solution. The titanium producer used software to provide real-time shop floor access to key production and financial information.
Working in a cyclical industry crunched even tighter by the economy, RTI was on the lookout for cost reduction. It saw the biggest potential in shop floor visibility, which was obscured by manual processes, system delays and stagnant — even incorrect — master data. Individual locations used nonstandard processes, and as a result, they had difficulty retrieving, analyzing and reporting on operations performance across the network.
With 20 locations, 1,750 employees and global supply chain customers, such as Boeing and Airbus, to satisfy, RTI had to close the gaps.
To clean up the process, RTI began by enhancing its reporting, from work center capacity to overall equipment status. Next was a production dashboard, which simplified and automated online confirmations. Another program captured real-time data from machines, both automatically, in terms of each machine’s performance and availability, and manually, in terms of its quality.
Now, production personnel use this system to reduce errors and improve overall efficiency.
While cleaning up the internal system, RTI was also cleaning up on the outside. It’d been practicing quiet sustainability for a while — reconditioning and recycling used oil in its plants, instituting a corporate ban on the use of injection wells for disposal and building a custom facility to allow a recylcer to consolidate and package metallic grindings. But in 2007, RTI spoke up with a green initiative to “minimize environmental impacts and strengthen environmental controls.”
Locally, RTI partnered with the Ashtabula River Cleanup and also implemented an Environmental Management Guideline across the company, modeled after the ISO 14001 Environmental Management Standard, to position the company for eventual ISO certification. RTI also established environmental teams at each facility to analyze real and potential environmental impacts and how to control them. So far, the teams have implemented several ideas, such as cleaning equipment with safer products and testing coolant recycling units.
How to reach: RTI International Metals Inc., (412) 893-0051 or www.rtiintl.com