Thursday, September 13, 2012

Two years ago Christopher presented the Rolls-Royce vision for "Manufacturing Operations Management" at the MESA Conference in Prague. The vision developed is now in an initial pilot phase and Christopher will share his experiences of the last 2 years and expectations with participants. Rolls-Royce Aerospace is an industry leader and major European manufacturer. Participants will gain a real insight into a real MES deployment.

- How complexity in Operations and IT is hampering manufacturers' ability to speed up decision making
- Profound rethinking of production models, operational processes and supply chain structures
- How customer fulfillment is the driving principle: moving from capacity constraints to capability opportunities
- Intelligent people, factories and supply chain
- The role of Information Technology: cloud, mobility, social business, big data analytics

Expectations by Operations executives keep increasing: Meet customer needs, control costs, rapid product innovation; efficient supply chains, minimize risk and error-free compliance.  Companies today must both improve operations and control risk, while also better managing and leveraging the interdependencies that support these objectives for workers, processes, products and assets. Managing all these complex objectives can be daunting but tools and integrated processes exist to ease the pressure. SAP is uniquely positioned for supporting these objectives, by leveraging an integrated solution platform, transparency to real time operating performance and increased insight via analytics. We will also consider the mobile, "Big Data Analytics" and social network technology boom, and their impact on the manufacturing landscape of the near future.

This presentation will provide you with the profitability impact of Operational Excellence as well as main market drivers in the Food & Beverage Industry.

Within a rapid changing market it is important to understand where the additional potentials are for making your process more effective and increase your profitability, as well as being able to react fast to market demands. Gain from others' experience on how Sustainability and Advance Process Control (APC) in combination with Manufacturing Operation Management (MOM /MES) improved their market opportunity and helped them to position themself in the market. "A day in your life" will present the results that can be achieved and how beneficial the different roles in your organization will be. Join us to get ideas and exchange with peers for actions in your organization.

In this presentation Mike will explore approaches taken to integrating quality systems into MES / MOM, or is it the other way around?

Practice quality begins with both product and manufacturing design. Typically these functions fall outside of the MES / MOM models. Mike will show how the virtual (CAD) design can be compared with the actual physical product to intrinsically build or produce high quality products.

Examples from Carlsberg, Ford and Toyota are used to highlight pragmatic implementations of integrated world class manufacturing quality systems.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Manufacturing software applications are not new in the nuclear fuel industry: the nature of the processed materials implies a high level of automation, robotics, and information systems. Both automated and manual operations, as well as quality controls, require error-proofing interlocks and detailed traceability of material movements, process conditions and procedures execution, all expected by national and international nuclear authorities.

Industrial operations cover the complete product supply chain from mining and chemical processing of uranium ore, processing of powder, liquid or solid forms, up to the discrete manufacturing and recycling of fuel assemblies. These operations were initially developed during the '70s and '80s and continuously improved until today with new chemical or mechanical processes like Gaseous UF6 enrichment by centrifugation, or used uranium and plutonium recycling into MOX (Mixed oxide fuel). This led to internal development of industrial software applications to manage, operate and trace those material flows and processes. Today there is still no dedicated "nuclear vertical" MES software solution available on the market, but after a deep review of recent leading MES multi-industry platforms, we found out that it is now technically possible and economically meaningful to accommodate most nuclear industry requirements with a standard based approach using selected MES and Data Historian products with the right level of configuration.

After the rollout of SAP, including integration to existing MES applications through MII and ISA-95 / B2MML, AREVA started the planning of MES standardization, analysing the functional blocks used across the manufacturing business units from the large legacy portfolio, defining a functional model for manufacturing operations based on ISA 95, and looking for possible standard components to define a flexible target architecture. AREVA will share some elements and some lessons learned with this "convergence initiative", including a view of the pilot MES projects launched in 2011 and 2012.

One of the largest manufacturers in the world, GE is deploying digitized MES systems across 75 of its manufacturing facilities in businesses as diverse as lighting, healthcare, motors, appliances and transportation.

This session focuses on execution systems covering the full production cycle from the release of orders to the completion of the product. The session presents the value of fully digitizing the manufacturing process ranging from finite capacity scheduling, route management and control, dispatch management, building to the correct set of manufacturing instructions, managing non-conformances, and collecting full product and process genealogy and traceability.

Any manufacturing process which leverages automated production equipment and instrumentation (ISA 95 Level1/0) typically has been partly or largely enhanced with software and communication interfaces for real-time process supervisory and control (ISA 95 Level2) for more efficient and safer process operations. Manufacturing Operations Management functions (defined as ISA 95 Level 3) for real-time production control and execution offers a larger optimization potential when direct integrated into process supervision and control management levels. The results can be significant improvements in operational agility and efficiency:

- higher level of automation and reduced operation intervention for equipment or recipe parameters downloads, data capturing for production and inventory tracking, compliance and quality control and documentation
- more efficient plant floor operations by integrated user interface approach for process, equipment supervision, production, quality or asset operations procedure management in common context of the manufacturing process.

Nevertheless integration architectures need to be carefully chosen in regards of TCO and sustainability, especially for the heterogeneous system landscapes of brown field plants and when it comes to multi plant MES implementations with shop floor and enterprise integration. The session will introduce the Wonderware ArchestrA system platform approach to unify real-time manufacturing operations applications for SCADA and MES functionality (ISA 95 Level 2 and 3), standardization of processes to reduce cost and avoid sustainability caused by complex integration architectures.

The presentation focuses on how MES/MOM technologies can be used in order to support Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma initiatives in the Manufacturing space. With current 'Manufacturing 2.0' trends as a backdrop it is explained how well known improvement methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma can be even more effective when supported by Manufacturing IT. This is done from the perspective of Siemens, a company that is both, one of the world's largest Manufacturers of industrial goods and, at the same time, a vendor of a wide range of industrial Software products - from PDM over MES/MOM all the way to HMI/SCADA and DCS-based systems.

This paper shall discuss the work in progress towards the implementation of Reliability Excellence in Northumbrian Water Ltd. Reliability Excellence is a business methodology that defines an orderly implementation of a collection of transformational processes that encapsulate the "best of class maintenance practices" for supporting a water and/or a waste-water treatment business. Each transformational process involves (i) a clearly identified goal, (ii) a set of failure causes (conditions) that the maintenance team should proactively monitor, (iii) opportunistic best practices to steer towards the goal, (iv) the training of the maintenance labor in the said best practices, (v) the setting up of an objective measurement standard or tool(s) to measure the improvement in the practices and (vi) the continuous tracking of the practices until the goal is achieved.

The paper shall elucidate, by means of field data and analysis, the work performed to date in Northumbrian Water Limited towards achieving a lower incidence of emergencies and corrective maintenance activities - the first step in the Reliability Excellence program. More specifically, the paper shall also illustrate the use of software tools for tracking metrics, such as, Availability of Critical Equipment, MTBF, MTTR, Unplanned Downtimes, Percentage Reactive Maintenance, OEE, etc., and the design (of the work in progress) for improving these metrics within the organization.

Energy today is a major element of production costs. Top level management is requiring efforts in energy costs reduction. Implementing a MES solution enables production managers to identify the real cost of energy (electricity, gas, water, hot water, steam, ?) while producing every piece of product or lot of products. In the same time, product managers could be alerted in real time as soon as energy consumption is out of the range specified in the standards. Presentation will also show - using projects experiences - that energy management projects can be combined with quality management projects to optimize the global ROI.

The presentation will discuss some of the critical success factors a manufacturing organisation may have to consider if they are to truly achieve Manufacturing Excellence. The content will consider all stakeholders involved in a projects success. The presentation should be of interest to all attendees at the conference as each of them will be one of the stakeholders discussed.

There is little or no information available in the literature on how to best distribute Operations Management functions over Business Planning and Operations Management applications (BPA and OMA). With functionalities of these types of applications constantly increasing, there is an increasing overlap in functionalities and an increasing number of possible choices.

To provide users with fact-based arguments to make those choices, ARC has been interviewing ten mostly global companies, to determine best practices in setting boundaries between Business Planning (e.g. ERP) and Operations Management (e.g. MES) applications.

In evaluating the results, we found they depend considerably on the way the performance is evaluated. In particular the "Best Practice Boundary", expressed in the percentage of operations management functions (ISA-95 functions) implemented in the Operations Management application versus the Business Planning application "moves"!

We found that the more functions companies implement in Operations Management (in the range studied):

- The number of providers decreases
- The degree of customization of the operations management application(s) increases
- The cost increases
- The business performance increases

Based on these variations, we defined a mixed balance of IT performance, cost and business performance, corresponding to a favorable optimum:

- Operations and maintenance perceive benefits close to the maximum,
- Costs, in particular Capex, have not increased in a major way, yet.
- IT tries hard to resist customizing, represented by "% requirement challenge", and interestingly
- The relative implementation speed is at its best performance.

Based on this balanced performance criteria, ARC determined Best Practices on repartitioning of ISA-95 functions over ERP and OM applications, and recommendations for other practices from the table above. The paper will provide the results for the sample of users we interviewed and calls for participation to increase the statistical significance of the results.

This presentation is focused on an implementation in one of the most innovative pharmaceutical companies in the world. Over the past several years, this company focused on implementing an MES system using a real-time data infrastructure as a key enabling component of the product execution system. This presentation will give an overview of this architecture.. We will show how data coming from this architecture is changing the way people visualize the production process and leading to better decisions and ongoing improvements such as:

reduced cycle times
superior batch quality and releases
thorough incident investigations
decreased process variability
real-time costing
better alarm
management and security monitoring

Themes - LEAN manufacturing; Real Time Enterprise, Managing Complexity, Improving Efficiency

The automotive industry is a major user of MES so what do they do, why do they do it and what benefits do they achieve?

Dave will review the areas of MES functionality and provide a detailed insight into why these systems are critical to the manufacture of modern automobiles.

From managing the delivery of material to the workplace to detailed data analytics all the elements of the MESA model have a place and deliver capabilities or business benefits without which your choice as a consumer and the competitiveness of the manufacturer would be compromised.

He will explore some of the opportunities for applying the same thinking and solutions to other industries and the potential benefits which could be gained. Dave will discuss:

- Delivering the customer benefit
- How efficient is your manufacturing operation
- Designing for complexity, variation and speed
- The future - when saving three seconds matters