Real-time, visibility on materials, process, or machine interactions can be leveraged to fix real-time production problems by quickly identifying the source, enable product recalls, or validate the end product for customers. A contact-less solution based on RFID, Wi-Fi and sensor technologies will accomplish all this without impacting the manufacturing process.
The Intelligent Edge:
WORK-IN-PROCESS VISIBILITY
David Orain, Vice-President Marketing, Omnitrol Networks
Omnitrol Networks, Inc. The Intelligent Edge: Work-In-Process Visibility
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.................................................................................................................................3 WORK-IN-PROCESS VISIBILITY FOR LEAN MANUFACTURING ....................................................................4 Reduce Waste ..........................................................................................................................................4 Smooth Production Flow.........................................................................................................................4 Real-Time Visibility.................................................................................................................................4 CURRENT WORK-IN-PROCESS SOLUTIONS ...............................................................................................5 Manual Process.......................................................................................................................................5 Total Cost of Ownership..........................................................................................................................5 Expensive Shop-Floor to Top-Floor Integration.....................................................................................6 Restricted Visibility .................................................................................................................................6 ACHIEVING AUTOMATED REAL-TIME VISIBILITY .........................................................................................7 Contactless technologies enable automated real-time data capture .......................................................7 Real-time intelligence on the shop-floor .................................................................................................7 Integrating real-time supply chain information ......................................................................................7 OMNITROL WORK-IN-PROCESS SOLUTION ............................................................................................8 CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................................................9
Omnitrol Networks, Inc. The Intelligent Edge: Work-In-Process Visibility
Executive Summary
To stay competitive, today's lean manufacturers need to provide real-time visibility on work-in-progress to their personnel to immediately react to changes and address problems. To stay compliant and provide better customer service, the same manufacturers need to track the parts, components, or raw materials that make up the end product without impacting their operations and increase their costs. Existing WIP visibility solutions are complicated by the need to integrate shop floor data gathering with various back-end systems from ERP to accounting and logistics and still provide local, actionable data to shop floor operators and supervisors. This level of integration is extremely difficult and expensive to achieve so, as a result, many manufacturers have a mix of disconnected shop floor and ERP information silos. This scenario limits the amount of useful and timely information available to floor personnel and management. Furthermore, isolating data processing from the production floor and a lack of standardization in devices and user interfaces makes it very difficult to maintain real-time WIP data without seriously impacting production efficiency. The addition of barcode scanners has enabled more information to flow from production floor but has the disadvantage of adding extra manual steps to the process. Real-time, visibility on materials, process, or machine interactions can be leveraged to fix real-time production problems by quickly identifying the source, enable product recalls, or validate the end product for customers who are increasingly demanding detailed knowledge on the contents, delivery dates, and history of the material, parts or end products they are buying. A contactless solution based on RFID, Wi-Fi and sensor t... [download for more]
