mentorpaper_81471

M A N U F A C T U R I N G W H I T E P A P E R w w w . m e n t o r . c o m / v a l o r MANAGE YOUR DATA FLOW TO GAIN VISIBILITY INTO PRODUCTION OPERATIONS MICHAEL FORD, MENTOR GRAPHICS Manage Your Data Flow to Gain Visibility into Production Operations w w w. m ento r.co m /v al o r 2 INTRODUCTION The term “shop-floor”, when used to describe a production operation, sounds simple, like an engine producing products as needed by customers. The reality, however, is that there are many complex elements that contribute to the operation to make it work. A casual observer may see these different elements working well together, in unison, coordinating between each other to make the operation run smoothly. The truth for many organizations, however, is quite the opposite. The individual disciplines that make up the shop-floor are actually worlds apart, each with different roles, each with different priorities and goals, even though the final goal, success for the business, should be the same. Technologies and systems that have evolved over the years supporting these individual needs have actually served to increase tension. As each area is optimized, weaknesses are exposed in others. The end result is often a very competitive environment where sometimes the business objectives are compromised. COMPETING SHOP-FLOOR DISCIPLINES Let’s consider the major elements on the shop-floor, from the perspective of information, analysis, cooperation and dependencies. PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT The measurement of success for the production team is very simple. The plan defines the production targets; those targets simply have to be achieved. Key metrics reveal actual cycle times, give an idea of the causes of stoppages, and can help build estimations cycle times. Significant variations in performance compared to the plan need to be managed, with the production team often implementing their own planning changes locally within the shop-floor. This is especially the case where planning cannot break the production plan down into enough detail to identify exactly which processes and lines are to be used for each work-order. The need for higher performance also drives the need to group products in different ways. Deviations from the plan put pressure on to the materials supply, which already is suffering inaccuracy due to accumulation of spoilage and other causes of poor inventory control on the shop-floor. This often leads to materials being the major cause of production down-time. Engineering also comes under pressure as products need to be moved between line configurations. Simply put, the production operation is dependent on all of the supporting functions. If any completion target is not met, the production team often tries to determine the cause for the failure to meet plan. This can be controversial, as the final symptom of what caused the delay is often not the root cause. SUPPLY CHAIN The mission of the supply chain team is to provide materials for the production operation. The key issues are inventory management, especially on the shop-floor where inaccuracies quickly accumulate, and the attitude of the production operators is not focussed on maintaining control of materials. When the production plan changes, there is frustration that materials are not physically available, when in theory, they should have been. Increasing overall stock holding is the usual way to delay effects of poor inventory management, but a significant price is paid for this in terms of material investment and write-off of “missing” stock when full physical stock checks are performed. PLANNING The planning team are under pressure to create plans for production which are efficient and productive, such that production can achieve their targets. There is however often very limited visibility of the progress of manufacturing, especially where the plan has been changed by the production team. Material inventory inaccuracies also contribute to increased risk that planning decisions cannot be executed successfully in production. As the mix of products increases, as does the volatility of customer demand, the more difficult it is to plan effectively. Knowledge of the specific available process configurations can be difficult to expand, as engineering would spend a significant amount of work to prepare each product over more than one configuration. This creates Manage Your Data Flow to Gain Visibility into Production Operations w w w. m ento r.co m /v al o r 3 a very narrow field of opportunity for shop-floor planning to improve their performance, and hence drive the operation to better performance PROCESS ENGINEERING The engineering team are responsible initially for new product introductions. There are decisions to be made early in the process about what line configurations to prepare each product for, and how to group products together on selected configurations. A lot of time can be wasted if multiple tools are required over the different machine vendor platforms, and the product model data, including the design data and the production bill of materials, are not complete, requiring data reconstruction. Disruption to the plan can also be significant where line trials of new products are needed as part of the new product introduction cycle. Engineering is often seen as a bottleneck, with very limited capability for operational improvement. Requests to move existing products between configurations in order to improve machine utilization are often next to impossible to achieve, as much of the whole process needs to be repeated. QUALITY MANAGEMENT The quality team are both the “police force” of the operation, and the final quality filter before completed products go out to the market. In terms of the policing role, the quality team are looking for control in the production operation, with as little variation as possible. Changes or exceptions for any reason introduce the opportunity for defects, which the team knows will be caught to some extent by test and QA procedures. Statistically however, the more defects that are found by the test processes, the more will also have got through to the market. The quality team are often frustrated by the continuous chaos in the production operation, and mistakes that are made especially when the production team is under pressure. HOW AN INTEGRATED INFORMATION PLATFORM BRINGS IMPROVEMENT Each of the roles in production have dependencies and requirements on each other. A focus for improvement in just one of these areas in isolation is rarely effective in the long term. Using the knowledge that everything is related brings the opportunity for improvement by taking an integrated view of the operation. Having information qualified against all aspects of the operation provides a much more accurate understanding of any exceptions of issues that may be appearing, in time for effective action to be taken before consequences grow. One example is the trend of material inventory loss. When inventory loss is identified early, negative consequences to the production line can be avoided. Mentor Graphics Valor PCB Manufacturing Software Solutions provide modules that support the specific operation and flow intended. The various modules provide a central, qualified digital representation of the entire manufacturing operation, including historical events and actions, the current status, and future projections. The single platform provides and maintains the context between different sources and types of information, enabling a balanced and complete view, such that with this knowledge, effective decisions can be made. HOW IS THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY DIFFERENT The Mentor Graphics Valor Information Highway is a new and innovative connection for the control, management and business systems to have detailed and live visibility of the entire production operation. Many API routines are provided within Valor Foundation itself, which are focussed on specific needs for specific processes. Professional services are normally required to develop the overall structure using these APIs to provide the output in a way which a receiving system can use effectively. Valor Information Highway however presents a higher level of Manage Your Data Flow to Gain Visibility into Production Operations w w w. m ento r.co m /v al o r 4 information and value derived directly from the integrated system core, enabling very specific and detailed data available in a live condition. Valor Information Highway minimizes the need for integration services, being ready to use directly at installation. Many of the key attributes of much more expensive true system integration can be realized through this simple, yet sophisticated, standard data flow mechanism. APPLICATION EXAMPLE: ENHANCING MRP There are too many potential applications of Valor Information Highway to list, so as an illustration, we will take an example where Valor Information Highway has already been used by a customer to enhance their MRP operation. The specific pain-point to be addressed was the inaccuracy and delay of information getting into MRP from material back-flush points on the shop-floor. Back flush is the most common technique used for MRP to take account of stock that has been used. There were two issues with back-flush that needed to be resolved. Firstly, the count of materials used was not correct, as back-flush simply multiplies the number of unit products completed by the quantity of parts per unit as held in ERP as the production Bill Of Materials (BOM). In reality, additional materials were needed, as the SMT process routinely rejects individual parts that may not appear to the machine as being picked up or recognized correctly. This can happen due to variation in the materials and the way they are packaged in the supply format. There can be losses due to errors with the accuracy with which the parts are placed, which may require replacement. Materials were also lost as boards were scrapped during the assembly process, or at test and repair. The repair operation itself consumes materials. Other common causes of materials loss were damage to materials whilst in transit, losses when being put on to a feeder, splicing, or even when putting a feeder on to a machine. The customer often made allowances to cover these losses, but in reality, there was a continuous variation in what was lost, with many peaks and troughs, which introduced cumulative errors in the material inventory. The second issue was timeliness. ERP separates the total production process for a product into a limited series of stages, Figure 1: The Mentor Graphics Valor Information Highway provides live information, from all areas of the integrated Valor shop- floor solution with higher levels of detail which can be used to connect advanced functionality between Valor and other systems with a vastly reduced need for customization. Manage Your Data Flow to Gain Visibility into Production Operations ©2013 Mentor Graphics Corporation, all rights reserved. This document contains information that is proprietary to Mentor Graphics Corporation and may be duplicated in whole or in part by the original recipient for internal business purposes only, provided that this entire notice appears in all copies. In accepting this document, the recipient agrees to make every reasonable effort to prevent unauthorized use of this information. All trademarks mentioned in this document are the trademarks of their respective owners. F o r t h e l a t e s t i n f o r m a t i o n , c a l l u s o r v i s i t : w w w . m e n t o r . c o m / v a l o r MF 10-13 MISC 1790-w normally lacking the ability to know the details to the level of which lines, configurations or machines, including potentially several separate processes, are involved in each stage. It is often not until the entire work-order was completed that the back-flush calculation can be triggered. If some production units were held back due to some issue it could introduce a significant delay. The effect of the delay is that MRP will still regard all materials as available and unused until the back-flush is triggered, and so provides an exaggerated view of available inventory, which often leads to unexpected machine stops due to the exhaustion of physical materials. Using the Valor Information Highway, several pieces of information from different sources were combined to create a real-time account of materials used and spoiled. The information was created and managed by different modules of the Valor PCB Manufacturing Software Solutions suite. The Foundation module broke down the macro-plan from ERP into the individual work-orders across the production operations and machines. Information about setup of each machine was then attached to each process. This was easily accomplished using data from Valor Process Preparation. This was the same data used by the program and feeder setups that the machine uses for production operations. During setup, Valor Material Verification identified the exact materials used. This could be different from the production BOM in MRP, as there could be material alternatives allowed and may be mixed within the work-order. During execution, data was collected directly from the machines, which was turned into information about consumption and spoilage on a specific material part number and carrier ID basis. The system identified exactly which material was used for each reference designator on each uniquely identified PCB of each work-order, along with the time stamp. This combination of planning, engineering, materials and production performance data can then be accessed on demand through the Valor Information Highway function. This completely replaces the need for the back-flushing operation, and ensures that the MRP inventory is maintained accurately and timely. The customer implementing this solution claimed that 80% of the total ROI of their investment of the whole of Valor PCB Manufacturing Software Solutions was realized through the use of this one function. CONCLUSION As production is driven to maintain the highest levels of productivity whilst also increasing product mix and reducing the response time for planning changes, it is of critical importance to have a balanced view of the production operation including all available information together before making key decisions. Valor Information Highway delivers the integrated and qualified view of the factory, enhancing the value of decisions made by systems like MRP, by experienced management team members who can really apply their skills based on clear facts, or for the end customer as proof of conformance with full process and materials traceability. The Valor Information Highway represents a significant enhancement from individual APIs that need to be made to work together, and so provides a faster and more economical solution.