Home › blog › 2023 › September › 1st › the right wiper in the right place
The right wiper in the right place
1st of September 2023 Article by Catherine Grinstead
Catherine Grinstead, brand & customer marketing manager - industrial UK & Eire for Kimberly-Clark Professional looks at how the wiping products can improve efficiency in industrial environments.
The right product for the right task at the right time in the right place - it's a no brainer! To truly enable efficiency in the industrial environment, manufacturers should visualise and optimise the entire manufacturing process, ensuring that routine tasks such as cleaning are not undervalued or under-visualised in the process.
Using the right materials for cleaning during production and between changeovers allow for an effective clean that eliminates the need for any rework due to cross-contamination or a poor-quality clean.
The consequences of deficient cleaning due to the use of generic solutions become further magnified across frequent product changeovers and can have a real impact on production timescales, equipment reliability and product quality, which translate into increased costs and reduced efficiencies.
The right dispenser
The quality of your dispenser is of course a contributor to enhanced productivity. When we talk particularly about new workflows such as agile manufacturing, we are looking for a prescriptive solution, over a reactive solution. The latest dispensing systems enable this prescriptive management of the cleaning or wiping task.
Smartening up the workshop
Often, particularly in an industrial space, loose rags are used to clear spills and contaminants from the working environment. Rags strewn about the place can be untidy, not to mention unsanitary. Using proper dispensing can significantly improve the appearance of the factory floor, as well as making wipes easy to identify for the task.
Users are rarely trained to use cloths to any scientific standard and have very little working knowledge of why you would use one above the other. Professional dispensing systems and packaging designs are made to clearly identify the best product for the task at hand, in a way which feels natural and instinctive.
Wiping systems are superior in every way, designed to make cleaning easy, painless and intuitive for the user. Rags often cross contaminate - in fact, we've learned from research that 100% of shop towels contain lead and other heavy metals. Just because they've been laundered doesn't mean they're clean! Foreign substances can create quality defects, potentially costing you time and money. Here's the good news: 98 per cent of defects are avoidable.
Kaisen, the five Ss and lean manufacturing have all become buzzwords in the industrial sector. We see these terms more and more often, and to add to this, 'agile manufacturing' is now a term being used more frequently by our industrial customers. The bottom line with all these practices, is that the manufacturer is setting out to make efficiency savings and improve processes by taking out wastage. This has a positive impact on productivity and hopefully improves downtime and results in cost savings.
RSS