Manufacturing Operations

INLEAN proposes advanced solutions in manufacturing environment to face the strategic challenges for production area with a shared vision that links manufacturing operations with product engineering and logistics. These challenges are:

Output product time to market.
Productive assets and human resources efficiency.
Product traceability and quality with fewer inspections.
Flexibility and scalability of production facilities.
Collaboration and agility between engineering and production for product and process improvement.
Reduce the risk and improve the economic business value.

MOM – Manufacturing Operations Management

The Manufacturing Operations Management, conceptually and according to the INLEAN Reference Model , brings together all techniques of production management, the ICT’s and the equipment for interaction with human resources and automation installations, making possible the fulfillment of daily production targets.

Production resources allocation and planning in finite capacity.
Product traceability and serialization.
Performance analysis of manufacturing (OEE, KPI ‘s).
Process management in real time by process analytical technologies (PAT).
Process data acquisition and historification for analysis, reporting and recording.
Quality management.
Production workforce management.
Energy resources and supplies management.
Final delivery of production and local logistics.
Link with batch process control, distributed control and automation.

A global MOM strategy facilitates collaboration with common standards and best practices among the multiple plants of a business group.

MES – Manufacturing Execution Systems.

As MES systems we understand generally the suite software solutions based on ISA-95 standards which modularly cover most of the level 3 areas of manufacturing operations management, from manufacturing scheduling to final product delivery. Its foundations are based on production modeling and their components.

In the MES marketplace there are more open or generalist platforms and other more specialized for a kind of industry or branch of manufacturing. Open solutions usually implement the functional particularities of specific sectors, using templates or factory built configurations. Addition or customization of functions is also possible and interfaces extend using service-oriented architectures (SOA).

When selecting an MES software from the best in the market, to ensure the future integration and collaboration across platforms, it is recommended that has consistent and efficient functionality in the following areas:

Collaborative capabilities among production’s human resources.
Security management services for access and critical operations.
Modeling of plant and production assets.
Data historization of operations.
Traceability and monitoring of events and alerts.
Specific applications designed for usability.

This modular and industry-specific approach can be illustrated by the following display of solutions for regulated manufacturing:

MeG / EBR – Manufacturing eGuide / Electronic Batch Record

Manufacturing eGuide, in general and EBR (Electronic Batch Record) or EBI (Electronic Batch Information) in particular defining a batch manufacturing process, consists in a translation of “traditional” product manufacturing procedure or paper recipe that is manually filled for each production order, towards an interactive computer system which converts various contents and documents into linked digital data and files.

The electronic batch includes all the operations and detailed tasks to be performed following route steps, areas and production lines established.

Through this transformation, Manufacturing eGuide includes the “added value” of the digital and interactive means:

Specific operation instructions step by step.
Verification of manual data entry and label or tag reader entry.
Centralized access to attached documents of the guide.
Operators access security control.
Automatic version management of guides with approval cycle.
Electronic signature to certify critical operations.
Data archiving protected and unalterable.
Reporting for supervision, production batch release and compliance auditing.

RMM – Recipes and Materials Management

Recipes and Materials Management is a basic tool to define the product composition and the transformation process of raw materials (or components), in semi-processed (or assemblies) and to the finished product using equipment or production assets.

The recipe (or an assembly procedure) defines how should be the formulation process of raw materials (or the components assembly) according to quality standards and process specifications. It also explains the local logistics of materials from reception, quality control sampling, in/out buffers allocation required for each operating station, to the storage conditions and finished product delivery.

The bill of materials (BOM) includes the substances or components required to generate a defined unit of finished product or a semi-processed, including their physical and chemical properties and specifications, material safety handling and storage conditions, expiration dates or other timing constraints.

The bill of equipment (BOE) joins all assets, tools, devices, pieces of equipment or installations needed to carry out a manufacturing process including setup instructions, availability status, cleaning procedure and equipment maintenance details.

Among the advantages of RMM, we highlight:

Product genealogy to track components and raw materials origin.
Accurate programming and dynamic production management based on finite capacity of assets and facilities.
Mass balance calculation, process performance, material waste and product defects.
Process, equipment, activities and incidents traceability on product serial number or manufacturing lot.

W&D – Weight and Dispense

During recipe preparation for manufacturing in regulated industries, material weight and dispense is one of the most critical operations within the process, the formulation or the conditioning lines. Some of these critical requirements are accurate identification of materials and containers, cleaning conditions, safety conditions in material and tools handling, net weight calculation based on potency or concentration of active components, environmental conditions control, record of materials consumption and security of access and data recording.

Therefore, it is essential to have:

Appropriate technological facilities: cleaned rooms, load handling systems, weighing systems, scales, tools, automatic labeling and identification.
Weighing methodology suitable to material characteristics and production typology: by manufacturing order or by material lot.
Information system that allows guiding, controlling, monitoring and documenting: automated tasks, operator manual actions and also to enable the verification of critical actions and to identify and manage the exceptions occurred.

MES and ERP – Manufacturing Execution System and Enterprise Resource Planning.

The integration of the Manufacturing Execution System – MES – within the ICT architecture of the company, complements the Enterprise Resource Planning – ERP – due to provide essential production information in a fully integrated environment that reduces reliance on manual entry data. It also facilitates the movement of critical information from the production area and enables decisions based on real events as they occur in the manufacturing plant.

The MES fulfills its mission through the functional integration with other enterprise systems, thus providing bidirectional synchronization of master data as real-time exchange of operational data.

Implementing MES integration, following major industry standards such as ISA -95 Part 5 or other transaction protocols between ERP and MES, the cost is reduced. Interfaces based on specific XML, languages like B2MML and service-oriented technologies (SOA) to interconnect applications, reduce the integration cost in less than half the current cost of the typical point-to-point connections and facilitate the rapid implementation of the integrated system.

MES and WMS – Warehouse Management System

Plant local logistics, raw materials storage and final products shipping should be based on a good plant layout design using 3D dynamic simulation of material flow: from reception through sampling, including warehouses, plant gathering areas, parking of containers, picking areas and final shipping.

Going along with the physical flow of material is essential a logical flow of data to locate a material in a location either inside or outside the warehouse. Thus, a logical location can specify one or more physical locations on the plant.

The general objective is a local logistics that has to be flexible and efficient enough to reduce the number of load movements avoiding bottlenecks and, at the same time, preventing materials stock breaks in production process.

The MES system defines a very precise logic model of locations and plant storage, work in process (WIP) material containers along with their status of availability, use, cleanliness and quality.

The MES system has interface capabilities to coordinate with handling automation, containers transportation and automatic identification systems. This way MES identifies, validates and traces containers and its content in relation to a production order along their route through the plant.

Solutions > Manufacturing Operations