Manufacturing Execution System connects elements of production that have been difficult to meet so far: industrial automation and an IT resource management system. Obvious? Not entirely. In practice, it looks like this: the devices responsible for production are usually separate components whose work, sometimes even in nanoseconds, is difficult to track. Meanwhile, the existing system supervising the production process, connected to appropriate office applications, has a reaction time from a few minutes to a few hours. For example: a laser marker works at a speed of 5 meters of marked material per second. How much product is it able to mark incorrectly in half an hour? 9 kilometers. MES allows for quick collection of information about the course of production processes in real time at a very high level of detail and – most importantly – to model it effectively, for example by stopping defective production and limiting losses.
Okay, but there is ERP, doesn’t it control this? ERP, through manually entered data, is not able to modify established plans based on current events and does not have insight into the production process in progress. It provides users with calculations based on recipes and routing, performs production settlements, and can perform profitability analysis according to standards and cost variances. But it will not answer the question of where such high production losses came from, which batches are defective, or what the efficiency of production lines is.
Quality determines savings
The spiral of quality costs is defined by the ten-fold rule. If detecting an error at the design stage costs one zloty, then at the production stage it is 10 PLN, and accordingly as much as 100 PLN when a defect is detected at the customer’s site. The MES system monitors the production process in real time, taking into account all resources, i.e., the industrial layer (machines and tools) and people. At the same time, it supports quality and safety standards such as HACCP, IFS, SIX SIGMA, BRC, TQM, and others. Using definable reports gives a full picture of the phenomena occurring on the production floor, from placing an order to shipping to the recipient. The system enables the collection of information about the genealogy of the final product, remembers additional information about which machine it was made on, by which people, from which batches of components and raw materials. This module, called GEN (Genealogy), allows for the introduction of a recipe describing the product structure for production needs and defines the possibility of using alternative raw materials, which constitutes the production flexibility necessary in current market requirements. MES also has the ability to set a blocked status for given components, which will mean that no one will be able to use them in the production process. The quality control department receives additional support in conducting tests through instructions, automatic reading of process parameter values from machines, and information about any exceeding of standards.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2010.