Smart Digital Manufacturing by Rene Wolf

Author:Rene Wolf [Wolf, Rene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783527830954
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-09-29T23:47:11+00:00

5.1 High‐volume Efficiency

Ensuring efficient customer delivery, optimizing production efficiency, and minimizing material waste are high‐priority objectives for many repetitive manufacturing companies. Siemens Motion Control Systems (known as Siemens Drives), which manufactures variable speed drives for control systems, machines, and panels, is a great example of how these objectives are affected by business growth and market conditions – and how a MOM point solution can yield both a strong return‐on‐investment (ROI) in the present and a tool that is compatible with future digital technology investments. From its factory in Congleton, England, Siemens Drives ships its products to a German warehouse, which fulfills orders from distributors and customers all over the world. This business structure means that Siemens Drives does not have a direct line of communication to customers, and this makes it more challenging to manage spikes in demand or establish future customer demand. Additionally, Siemens Drives wants to increase both its rate of growth and share of the market while addressing downward pressure on the price of electronics, as well as meeting customer needs for configurable or customized products.

Siemens Drives recognized that a key to meeting its goals was implementing advanced planning and scheduling (APS). The company had a homegrown solution that had not been fully maintained. As a result, a single team member had become the planning point person – using separate spreadsheets and numerous formulae to manage stock levels, open customer orders, and sales forecasts – and this point person represented a potential single point of failure.

Implementing an integrable APS point solution, Siemens Drives has experienced much more efficient planning and scheduling. The APS is able to take data from any application or database, look for emerging patterns of demand, and bring to light any potential resourcing issues. The APS system provides a graphical long‐term planning tool that also provides a visible alert to changes. If the company needs to make a scheduling adjustment, the APS promptly performs it. Efficiency gains include a gain of four percentage points in delivery capability and a 20% reduction in inventory of finished goods. The system also helped Siemens Drives uncover a bottleneck in the final assembly stages of one production line and make adjustments that resulted in a 14% improvement in utilization and a 60% reduction of semifinished products in that production cell.

Importantly, the integrable APS possesses the scalability and extensibility needed to meet future planning and scheduling needs as the company continues to grow and as it implements a future generation of manufacturing operations management (MOM) technologies.

Like Siemens Drives, many companies performing repetitive manufacturing are starting their digitalization journey with integrable point solutions. Many have been relying on analog and paper‐based management of their manufacturing operations. And this approach has met their production needs – until recently. Business growth, changing product and production standards, growing competition, and other factors shine a spotlight on opportunities to improve productivity and resource utilization with digital technologies. Without digitalization, there may be limited correspondence between the manufacturing plan or schedule and what is actually

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