In order to survive this Mass Customisation era, one needs to utilise both cyber and physical approach and realise ‘high quality’ and ‘high productivity’ Smart Factory. With the support of innovative technologies, Panasonic helps companies set up Smart Factory that offers production flexibility to meet the demands of today’s market, says Aman Jain.

 

The manufacturing industry is experiencing a reinvigoration in the use of Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solutions as critical business tools. With an explosion in the number of modules and options available, MOM solution has evolved into a sophisticated industry solution, both multi-faceted and technologically advanced.

 

In today’s market, information of new product can be spread out rapidly, and market trend can be changed quickly. Many customers try to promote their own unique product to stand out in this competitive market which leads to “many customised orders’ from client. Under this kind of circumstance today, the challenge mentioned earlier gets harder and harder, putting more pressure on manufacture.

In order to survive this Mass Customisation era, one needs to utilise both cyber and physical approach and realise ‘high quality’ and ‘high productivity’ Smart Factory.Smart Factory is the factory with flexible production and strong constitution to meet demand of today’s market with the support of innovative technology.

 

Panasonic MOM solutions consist of four major activities:

 

Defining KPI/KGI of the total operations

Panasonic start from studying customer’s manufacturing process and actual factory operation on site. Then we sort out challenge our customer is facing, what is desired goal of our customer, and how we can achieve the goal.Based on the entire plan agreed with our customer, we make a proposal for MOM (Manufacturing Operation Management) solution plan which is designed for evolving entire factory operation. We also make an automation plan for specific production processes to maximise its productivity.

 

And we continue to follow up with our customer after system Go Live to make sure our solution supporting our customer’s business to thrive.

We set a goal and how we can achieve it together with our customer.

 

Resource allocation planning with PPC software module

After setting up KPI, we work on optimised resource allocation production schedule utilising scheduler software ASPROVA to realise efficient overall factory operation.Scheduling is crucial in order to realise Smart Factory. Production line is not only one in factory and we need to think about how to optimise production on all processes in factory.Good production planning could shorten idling time between previous and post production process, and arrange production with different priority to meet request from different customer in order to secure factory profit.

We can evolve production planning by accommodating actual production result data. With the actual production data, we could reschedule production plan considering delay on production or additional order to adjust the plan. We can do it semi-automatically with scheduler software. Good production planning optimise resource and capacity for all production lines, and contribute to maximize productivity of entire factory.

 

After the production schedule is generated, we communicate it with shop floor and send schedule as production instruction via MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and collect production data from same channel.

 

MES Software to collect data from shop floor

After production is started or finished the customers need to collect the production data. But collecting essential data is not so easy. The customers may have already automated production process and they can collect production data automatically from equipment. We have our own MES Tool-Process Tracker which can track the process right from raw material to work-in-progress to finished goods and dispatch.

Another major issue in assembly line is relying on manual labour. In most of the cases, line operator make production report manually on paper after shift of the day is finished. After that, those reports need to be typed into excel manually so it is a double work and obviously not efficient.

 

Inspection report is another problem. The customers make reports for all those products inspected but they need to link these reports to every production history so they can trace back when & which production line the product was made in case they receive claim from their customers

How we can solve these problems? Our solution for digitalization for manual reporting is i-Reporter. 

i-Reporter is a new style of ‘Field Reports’, recording, reporting and browsing through tablet, which integrates digital and handwritten input.

With Process Tracker and i-Reporter, we can capture all shop floor data digitally for storage and further analysis.Visualization of shop floor operations and getting key insights with BI tool We should have proper knowledge and experience to check key insights into the data captured. With our business intelligent web application BI Tool-MotionBoard, we can process and customise data into visualization information with many standard and customised templates.

 

By visualising production data, we can easily know production status or on-going production problem so we can take quick action to fix the problem when problems found.We can work with our customer and propose which data or index is needed/helpful for your purpose based on our experience in manufacturing.Panasonic don’t just work on Smart Factory concept but we take manufacturing approach based on our factory running experience in 100 years and realise true Smart Factory.

 

About the author:

Aman Jain is the Industry 4.0 Business Head of Panasonic Smart Factory Solutions India - a Division company of Panasonic India Pvt Ltd. Panasonic Smart Factory Solutions India offers high value-added, smart solutions and services along with world-class hardware to the manufacturing industry. For details, contact Amrityoga, Senior Manager - Marketing, Panasonic Smart Factory Solutions India (Division company of Panasonic India Pvt Ltd, Gurgaon) on Mob: 097299 95228 or Email: amrit.yoga@in.panasonic.com