Tackling the bottlenecks of information flow with MES

In a factory environment, information can often cause a bottleneck in productivity. Mikko Mäki-Rahkola, Development Manager IT at Pesmel, an internal logistics, storing and packing solutions supplier, explains how Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) increase the information flow in a factory environment, thereby improving the overall productivity.

”When you aim to improve the efficiency of a factory environment, hardware can get you to a certain point. But after that point it is intelligence that counts. The bottlenecks of efficiency and safety essentially come from information: how well the production planning has been made, how optimally you are using your stock and how much stuff is kept in stock in the first place”, Mäki-Rahkola explains.

The importance of software in factories has increased for several decades. Software has become more and more efficient, and after the arrival of the internet, different organizations have been able communicate to one another more easily. This, in turn, has made transferring information between different devices easier.

According to Mäki-Rahkola, when it comes to discussing business improvement, technology can sometimes steal the spotlight. Nevertheless, in todays factories there are still a lot of people delivering the actual information and making decisions about what to do and how to do it. In conversations regarding the industrial internet, information is often understood as information derived from devices as well as larger amounts of data created with the help of sensors and an internet connection. The utilization of capabilities provided by the industrial internet is, as Mäki-Rahkola points out, still in its early stages. At the same time it should be noted how many factories are lagging on performance by using very traditional methods.

”At the factory floor level, Excel files and paper sheets are still widely in use. For example, in order to find out the origin of a single consignment, you have to combine many different pieces of information. I believe that in the future, both the devices in a factory and the data for their operation will be managed by a single intelligent platform.”

Mäki-Rahkola thinks that MOM (Manufacturing Operation Management) systems will be the next big thing in manufacturing, following the large scale implementation wave of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems and past MES (Manufacturing Execution System) experiments. In addition to traditional MES functionalities such as production execution, data collection and device control, MOM systems also include stock control, quality control and maintenance control functions. These systems make it possible to manage the production processes so that production plans can be made accurately according to demand and the current stock, all the while streamlining the whole process.

Traceability is essential

One reason for companies to renew their manufacturing execution systems is better information processing and data acquisition leading to improved traceability. Mäki-Rahkola says that there are still surprisingly many factories where managers do not know the amount of goods being produced in the factory on a given day.

In various industries today the pressure to improve traceability is huge.

“For example, if you need to find out why a customer has gotten food poisoning or why a component in an airplane is damaged for no apparent reason, the tracing has to go all the way back to the individual ingredients of the product or to the manufacturing process of the component in order to find out if quality control during the manufacturing process has been sufficient. The amount of information is massive and the need to track down this information has become very time-sensitive. This is not possible with traditional methods.”

Methods used at the factory floor level can, however, be very traditional. Mäki-Rahkola gives an example about a case where a team of nearly ten people was running a factory’s production planning. Even though the company was using ERP and modern, automated equipment, there was still an information bottleneck.

The production plan was in practice realized as dozens of device-specific and production line-specific Excel files. If the company received an urgent new customer order, the production manager looked at the main schedule Excel file to see which orders had to be prioritized and which orders could be delayed. The team would then identify all of the orders and the planning team would recalculate them again. This requires a massive reprocessing of Excel files where tables would be manually updated to make sure that everything matches. And, as we all know, with manual updates there is always a chance of miscalculations and errors in addition to the manual work and time delays.

With modern manufacturing execution systems, this kind of manual information handling and optimization can be automated. A single person can place the order in the main production plan and the software can re-calculate and re-optimize thousands of other orders and their new constraints, all within seconds.

Adopting a labor-intensive way of doing things is still common, and there are historical reasons to explain this. When labor costs were low, it was common to think that material handling can be made faster with the addition of more truck drivers, for example. Now, these same needs are repeating in information handling, and the management of increasing information flows has traditionally been done by increasing the number of people managing the information.

When it comes to information handling, companies have started waking up to automation as well. With labor costs and the number of orders as well as the amount of necessary information in each process increasing, it is not possible to become more effective solely by hiring new people anymore, Mäki-Rahkola sums up.

Mikko Mäki-Rahkola works as Development Manager IT at Pesmel

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