An efficient shop floor relies on a lot of complex data for managing its operations: Bills of Materials (BOMs), variant configuration, recipes, routing, work orders, and production schedules. Shop floor output is visible in the form of work-in-progress, finished products, defects and scrap – data collected throughout the manufacturing process.
The complexity of operations and related data becomes more apparent as Small and Mid-sized Manufacturers (SMMs) try to scale up with more production lines, factories and workers. Why wait to discover the enormity of the challenge, and not become efficient before scaling up?
SMMs use spreadsheets and email heavily to track much of the data used in designing, producing and shipping their products. Operating in this manner contributes to issues such as: (i) multiple versions of the truth, (ii) a fire-fighting culture, (iii) cost of poor quality, and (iv) poor supply chain responsiveness.
Before talking about solutions, we need to consider the requirements of SMMs and the constraints they face through their transformation journey: (i) limited capital, (ii) time to value, and (iii) solutions unfit for purpose (reference: MxD Strategic Investment Plan 2023).
To begin with, cloud-based solutions with edge and no code/low code capabilities offer the best compromise. There are multiple benefits of this approach:
- Since cloud-based solutions (e.g. Software as a Service) offer subscriptions, their cost can be treated as operating expenses. Most cloud solutions allow administrators to view usage and manage costs on an ongoing basis, and therefore allow for scaling up or down according to business needs and budget allocation.
- Customers avoid the costs of standing up and maintaining software and the IT infrastructure. In other words, SMMs do not need to worry about unsupported software due to expired maintenance contracts.
- Cloud-based solutions provide faster time to value due to the fact that the software and IT infrastructure are already in place in the vendor’s data center.
- Low code/no code capabilities built into the vendor solutions offer customization options. We will delve further into this topic as we walk through the solutions.
Four types of solutions immensely benefit SMMs for capturing, storing, sharing and analyzing data for engineering and manufacturing purposes:
- Product Data and Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) – PDM/PLM software have become essential for designing engineered products and their parts, managing design changes, and maintaining Bills of Material as inputs to procurement and manufacturing operations processes. Without a PDM/PLM solution, manufacturers have difficulty maintaining the end-to-end integrity of R&D, manufacturing, procurement and customer support processes. An important consideration before purchasing a PDM/PLM software is its integration with existing CAD software.
- Manufacturing Execution System (MES) – MES can be used for creating and tracking work orders, managing production recipes and schedules, and tracking production, quality, and asset utilization metrics. While a solution developed and maintained by a vendor saves an immense amount of headache, the complexity of manufacturing means there is no one-size-fits-all MES or Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solution.
Low code/no code capabilities allow manufacturing control and industrial engineers to extend the out-of-the-box features to meet their unique business needs. In addition, solutions that include support for edge devices and systems such as PLCs, HMIs and SCADA are a better fit for SMMs looking to empower their line workers and managers with functions such as reporting their output in close proximity to physical operations, and analyzing the data to compare with targets.
- Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) – CMMS enables the central storage of equipment usage instructions, maintenance information and equipment schedule. Such a system is necessary for training workers in the proper use of equipment, and keeping them informed on maintenance and usage schedules. SMMs may want to consider cloud-based enterprise collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Docs to enable information sharing globally with high availability and performance. They can be used as a rudimentary CMMS until the need for more sophisticated functionality is identified. Collaboration tools make it easy to request and grant permissions to use documents, collaborate within documents as they go through multiple drafts, and create groups and communities of practice.
- Data integration – We have touched upon the need to collect data from manufacturing equipment and processes to improve visibility into their operations. This data can be shared with applications and used for enterprise analytics. Companies often resort to either manual data extraction or point-to-point data integration under the pretext of moving fast to meet a business need. This practice does not scale very well, and in fact becomes a hurdle when systems are switched out as part of major transformations.
Applications and Data Analytics solutions should be able to subscribe to data published by PLCs and SCADA systems through a data integration broker for real-time consumption. An integration broker also offers the ability to queue up the data streaming from the providers such that if a consumer application is down, it remains queued in the integration broker. When the consumer comes back up, the queued data is automatically sent over by the integration broker. This architecture makes the data infrastructure fault-tolerant and reduces the data recovery time.
In conclusion, PDM/PLM, MES/MOM, CMMS and a data integration broker improve the efficiency of manufacturing operations by collecting, storing and transmitting manufacturing design and execution data in a highly organized manner and according to industry best practices. SMMs need to consider cloud-based solutions with no code/low code capabilities to automate processes, improve security, reduce human error, adjust to changing demand, and scale up their manufacturing operations while improving their bottom-line.
Learn more from the following resources:
- Read manufacturing case studies featuring the use of Siemens Teamcenter software for PDM and PLM.
- Watch this video of a small manufacturer Mack Molding’s success story featuring the use of Tulip Interfaces to create work instructions, train workers, monitor production, improve traceability and agility, and access production analytics in real-time.
- Read all about a process manufacturing Digital Twin prototype developed at the Digital Manufacturing Institute (MxD).
- Read a Forbes article on how MES and CMMS systems work together and impact manufacturing.
- Read HiveMQ’s blog series to learn about Unified Namespace (UNS), which has gained wide acceptance for integrating hardware and software in the manufacturing applications stack.
- Read Litmus’ customer stories about the adoption of UNS for improving manufacturing operations.
