Automating real-time and human workflow extensions for Work-in-Process deployments
Work-in Process (WiP) scenarios involve a multitude of discrete steps to effectively ‘track’ activity at each manufacturing station and ‘trace’ the build to order process through their lifecycle.
A process flow for a simplistic WiP scenario usually has the following characteristics:
- Customer needs to track orders through a manufacturing process
- Manufacturing process has multiple steps, each step is performed at a station
- Stations have “dwell times” or minimum processing times
- Stations have thresholds for expected, normal, severe, and critical delays
- Orders have “planned routes”, deviations from plans are considered exceptions
The inherent build-to-order nature of these applications implies real time tracking and human workflow automation requirements such as location sensitive put a way, build to order job assignment, location sensitive bill of materials picking, time and location sensitive job tracking, and shipment tracking that are typically not handled well by a LoB system which is more focused on the business processes being automated such as procurement, invoice and order processing. This often results in issues such as:
- Lack of visibility into which station is processing a particular order at any time, and hence the inability to increase priorities of orders being processed at a station to fix delayed orders in-flight
- Lack of audit trails for orders being processed, especially if it involves a quality control check that resulted in a ‘re-route’ of the order
- Increased dwell times at each station if priority is unknown
- Increased customer promise violations, ‘stuck orders’, inability to get snapshots of processing workloads across a facility etc.
Solution:
Gaining visibility into work-in-process is critical for most manufacturing, assembly, and product lifecycle management applications. The parameters of visibility include presence, location, auditing, start/stop information, and other contextual information.
The goal of the RTVS™ WIP Solution is to use RFID and other auto-identification technologies to seamlessly provide work-in-progress visibility in a pervasive but non-intrusive fashion. It is pervasive in the sense that the entire lifecycle of the product creation process is tracked; it is non-intrusive in that the operator does not have to perform any additional steps or be trained on any new technology to realize the value of the solution.
Once the process flow information is gathered using a XL forms based approach to specify the ‘plans’ for the solution, the S3 solution provides for real-time decision making and analytics capabilities, in addition to providing data that can be used for further business intelligence. The former enable you to make real-time choices in your plant floor or assembly line, the latter enable holistic business process re-engineering over the long-term.
Another business benefit of the solution is to enable product track-and-trace, and recall functionality, where the “pedigree” or origination information regarding the item is made available for decision making at a later point. This can be extremely important in scenarios where you need to identify items that were also manufactured with a particular item, or items that were processed on a particular station.
This schematic below outlines how a customer, GKB H-Tech, uses the S3Edge RTVS™ solution for Work-In-Process Manufacturing of custom optical lenses to enable processing, storing, searching, and prioritization of orders at each station in real-time.
Benefits
- Delayed orders fixed in-flight and finished on time
- Reduced customer violations
- Reduced dwell time at stations, and increase in yield of overall manufacturing process
- Process improvements based on station utilization
- Direct impact on reducing operational expenses due to better planning and execution of jobs, and lesser resource requirements to chase down ‘missing’ or ‘stuck’ orders
