EMI - S6
IMPROVING PERFORMANCE
An arduous task
Planning production is a task that has on eintrinsic complexity linked to the amount of information that a planner should take into account to draw up an efficient and effective production plan (market demands, availability of materials, availability of resources, peculiar characteristics of some processes, etc.).
To the intrinsic complexity is added, exponentially amplifying the effect, the process variability and in recent times the variability in demand and supply channels.
There process variability it is an aspect often overlooked by our fabric companies. Failure to understand this aspect, as explained by Deming and shared by several illustrious organizational theories, is one of the major sources of company inefficiency.
Variability of processes and demand and supply channels, they often invalidate a well-made production plan after a few hours from its implementation, creating on the one hand an overload of programming personnel and on the other hand climate of extreme uncertainty.
The direct consequences
The direct consequences of this extreme uncertainty are on the one hand errors of evaluation that the planner often commits without awareness and on the other protection mechanisms that the organization is led to adopt and which they ultimately turn into stocks, accumulated in an inconsistent and senseless way along the logistics chain.
S6 SUPPORT
Greater reactivity of the logistics-production system
With the introduction of EMI-S6, production planning will have at its disposal a tool capable of estimating the arrival date of purchases in just a few seconds, allocating production operations to the various resources and estimating the expected delivery date, while at the same time reporting the critical issues and anomalies in the production plan.
The direct consequence is that the company will respond faster improving flow, reducing overall costs and providing better service to its customers.
FUNCTIONAL COVERAGE
MRP + PLANNING
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Advanced MRP analysis, with simultaneous dating of orders and production operations based on calendarsdefined for suppliers and internal work centers.
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Real-time recalculation of workcenter capacity/load profiles (CRP).
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Rich parameterization including minimum lots, multiple maximums, fixed, variable and safety lead times, safety stocks, coverage and bundling periods and quantities, activation thresholds.
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Parameterization for groups of articles.
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MRP Rules by priority.
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Management multi warehouse with transfer rules.
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Management a product variants.
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Alternative cycles.
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Recovery alternatives and components running out.
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Tools analysis and reporting anomalies and critical issues in the production plan.
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Scheduling features single group or mass of production orders and customer orders with simultaneous recalculation of capacity / load profiles.
SCHEDULING
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Time allocation a finite capacity of purchase orders and production operations based on the expected and finalized setup and processing times, of availability calendar of the resources involved (including maintenance plans and machine downtime), of the expected arrival of materials from outside (both supplier orders and external processing).
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Management alternative resources and rules (priorities) of use.
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Management of secondary resources (equipment, moulds, teams, skills).
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Management of overlap of orders and operations of production with advancement to handling unit.
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Setup matrices.
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Management Batches (or amalgamations) for modeling furnace or galvanic operations.
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Tools analysis of critical issues.
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Wide possibility of user intervention with drag and drop functionality.
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Automatic recalculation in real time in the event of disruptions (delay of a supplier, breakdown of a machine).
KPIs
Rich set of fully configurable KPIs by the user and with real time recalculation, for the aggregate evaluation of the qualitative parameters of the production plan.
Sectoral Specificities
The different production companies, although sharing the same basic problems, have different peculiarities that the planning process must take into account. The vertical modules of S6 allow us to address these specific, usually sectoral, problems.
Variant management is applied to those sectors, such as textile and the goldsmith production, in which a very high variety of finished products is obtained that start from the same model.
The variety of products is linked to the combination of variants of the same item (sizes and colors for the textile sector, count, color and thickness for the goldsmith sector).
This factor generates great management complexity linked to the numerous repetitive information to be provided to a management or planning system which would translate, without variant management, into a huge volume of production orders that planning should manage.
PRODUCT VARIANTS
Companies that have a mechanical processing department typically face complexities related to the following aspects.
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Variety of processes and machinery available to carry them out (single purpose machines, multi-pallet or multi-purpose machines or stations).
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Non-linear flow, job shop organization, typically a single part passes through multiple stations but the path depends on the part itself.
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Setup times with high impact on processing time.
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Equipment and molds shared between machines, which must be considered as a constraintsystem.
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Special skills required of personnel both in setup and in charge of the machine.
MECHANICAL WORKING
Companies that deal with molding, whether of plastic or other materials, typically have to deal with these types of complexities:
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Mold management: for the same press, it is the availability of molds and particular equipment that limits production.
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Skills: teams of toolmakers are typically scarce in the company and have professionalism that is difficult to find on the market, therefore they constitute an important constraint.
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Setup times: setup times are typically significant and therefore it is necessary to optimize them, saving press time and toolmaker time.
MOLDING PROCESS
The potential of the line, especially when this ispartially manual, it is connected with the availability of the staff, which by its nature is variable and, moreover, usable on different lines.
Furthermore, the assembly line is typically the last phase of the process and in fact the point where the company's daily production is generated. One of the major problems in its organization is the synchronization of the components that must power the line, which translated into practical terms means ensuring that the line does not suffer downtime due to the lack of just one of the components.
The DDOM approach, implemented by S6, offers excellent results in this case because it guarantees:
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Control the entire process by controlling only the line process.
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Send signals backwards to purchases and previous processes so that all components arrive on time at the time of assembly, but at the same time guaranteeing more than acceptable WIP levels.
ASSEMBLY LINES
This category includes companies in the gold, metal or precious stone sectors and in general all companies in which the margin on the finished product is low in percentage in relation to the cost of the raw material or alternatively which suffer from the poor availability of a material or component.
For these companies the system constraint is very often not found in production but in the procurement process and the planning system must consequently take this aspect into account in order to guide the planner to the best possible production plan with the raw material available.
In the particular case of goldsmith production, there is also the problem of the product variant, which specifically is a variant of fineness, thickness and colour.
