Axon manufacturing case study

How Axon manufacturing is reducing data collection times by 25%

THE MISSION

Axon provides body-worn cameras, conducted energy weapons and data management software to law enforcement, federal agencies and Fortune 500 organizations across the globe. We play a critical role in providing transparency and certainty into organizations' most critical interactions. With such an important role, one of our core focus areas is ensuring the products we build exceed every standard of durability and reliability. It's a driving force behind our decision to build our products in-house where we can strictly monitor and control quality and output.

THE CHALLENGE

The Axon Manufacturing team has been building high quality products for over two decades and has a history of producing rugged hardware that performs flawlessly in tough environments. One area that the team has been focused on is improving efficiency and performance across shifts to increase output without sacrificing quality. As the demand for Axon products continues to increase, we strive to find new efficiencies to increase production capacity.

As our customer demand expands across the globe and into new industries, it's critical we find new operational efficiencies without sacrificing quality.

- Bill Denzer, VP of Manufacturing Operations

THE SOLUTION

Axon Manufacturing adopted the very equipment they are producing to gain transparency and insights into production processes. Instrumenting employees, lines and testing facilities with Axon Body 3 cameras is providing new insights that are enabling the team to speed root cause analysis and reduce cycle times. The Axon Network of connected cameras and a smart data management platform is automating the capture of critical data and making it easy to share that data across shifts and teams to standardize and improve processes and workflows.

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

Axon body cameras and video data enabled the manufacturing team to reduce process data collection times by 25% and utilize the data to identify opportunities for improvement. In a facility with 15 to 30 processes per line across 22 lines, Body cameras have streamlined the process data capture across all lines to quickly assess the standard process parameters and identify variances. This process data is seamlessly shared with manufacturing and industrial engineers who can identify opportunities for quality and cycle time improvements that would have been missed with traditional observation methods.

An organized library of video data has made it easier to troubleshoot and share learnings across shifts.

- Anita Shah, Sr Manager, Manufacturing Excellence Operations

QUALITY CONTROL

The team is using video data to ensure quality on the manufacturing line and for testing of completed product. The focus is on continuous improvement and root cause analysis if anything goes wrong on the line. Video has proven a powerful tool to quickly pinpoint errors and rapidly fix problems. In one instance, there was a variance in scrap rate. What video enabled the team to quickly identify was that it was being caused by process variation between shifts. Video enabled supervisors to understand and remedy this - reducing scrap by 15%.

TROUBLESHOOTING

Before implementing body cameras in our manufacturing facilities, identifying root cause of failures or inefficiencies was a process that often relied on manual line inspection to get to the root of the problem. While this proved effective and the team was able to eventually diagnose and remedy any issues, body cameras are providing a clearer and more immediately understandable picture that can be reviewed by industrial engineers to troubleshoot manufacturing issues. The team is realizing a time savings of 10% by being able to more quickly root cause any problems on the manufactur-ing line. The team is also using body cameras to document testing of TASER devices to be able to quickly identify where deployment went wrong in case of failure. Video footage is proving useful to get an at-a-glance understanding of failure modes for some tests. In addition, being able to easily share videos with colleagues is speeding time to resolu-tion and enabling the team to realize a root cause analysis time savings of 20%.

Body-worn cameras have allowed us to identify opportunities for improvement that would have been missed with traditional methods.

-Erick Arvizu-Santos, Manager of Quality Engineering

By implementing our own solutions in our manufacturing facilities, Axon is improving the efficiency and level of product output, without sacrificing quality, so we can continue to meet the demand of a globally expanding customer base.

Interested in learning more about how Axon can improve your operations? Contact the Axon team today at

Axon.com/Commercial