How to meet the challenges of the modern world?
How to implement and use modern tools to support production management: OEE, KPI, LEAN, Industry 4.0, to prepare a company for the dynamically changing market, taking environmental and social conditions into consideration.
The last 2 years has been difficult for all of us and have revealed which companies are able to react quickly and adapt to sudden, global changes in the economy. The recent crisis affected both the largest and small companies, caused staff shortages, a large increase in general prices, disrupted supply chains, and thus disproportionately increased the cost of raw materials.
Of course, it is difficult to prepare for such sudden and great disruptions, but we can and are able to minimize the negative impact of these changes by increasing the flexibility of the production process along with reducing production costs.
I will not discover anything new by saying that one of the elements of the plant’s transformation should be the digitization of the production management process. Simply speaking, the implementation of systems facilitating and optimizing the plan and process management (APS and MES).
Unfortunately, I quite often encounter a situation where APS planning systems are implemented without specific feedback from production. This is a wrong approach because it is difficult to optimize anything without real-time monitoring of the implementation, the plan is only as optimal as it has up-to-date data. Therefore, it is recommended to use these systems simultaneously and even start digitization with the implementation of a production management system – MES.
An additional advantage in favor of the implementation of a MES system, in the first place, is the need for monitoring not only the progress of the order, but also the costs associated with production. Good MES systems allow you to monitor resources such as machines, tools, and employees. However, only the best ones supplementing these data with basic production parameters, such as energy consumption – which is more and more expensive, and which soon can become the basic production cost for many companies.
It is also worth paying attention to the fact that monitoring and thus limiting utilities consumption has not only an economic aspect, but also an ecological one. Many manufacturing companies try to adapt the production process to have as little impact on the environment as possible. More and more customers pay attention to the fact that the products they order have the smallest possible CO2 footprint.
I cannot fail to mention here the additional benefit of implementing a comprehensive production management system, obtained on improving communication within the plant. The MES system facilitates such communication and even automates certain information flow processes, for example, the implementation of the following modules: Operator OEE – tools for monitoring the status of machines and Maintenance – for maintenance management allows for automatic reporting of downtime and forces a quick and even immediate response to a machine stop / failure.
To sum up, one crisis passes, but as history shows, the next one will come, and it is worth preparing the next one. In response to the continuous increase in the prices of utilities, raw materials, employee costs and the need to increase the flexibility of the process, we propose the implementation of the Operator MES / OEE solution.
The Operator OEE module allows you to monitor resources and calculate performance indicators. The Operator MES, on the other hand, provides a comprehensive picture of the production implementation, from the receiving of the raw material to the shipment of the products to the customer.
