The Manufacturing Operations Management Institute (MOMi) is pleased to announce we have become a technology partner for MES4SME initiative at Gent University and Vlaanderen Industrie 4.0. The purpose of the MES4SME initiative is to look at how digital manufacturing will work for small and medium enterprises in the Gent/Kortrijk region. Exploring how Industry 4.0 might [...]
The successful MESA MES/MOM Certificate of Competency manufacturing industry’s only independent education program has had a major overhaul after 11 years. Whilst the program has had small continuous improvements this is the first time it has been reviewed and updated to reflect today’s manufacturing practices. Utilizing their combined knowledge and that of [...]
Many new IT systems on the manufacturing shopfloor require a login from a named user, often for good reasons for example; Security: “Is the system operated by a known user?” Role-based authorisations: “Is the user authorised to approve the batch and close the order?” Audit trail requirements: to record what happened and [...]
If you had all the data from the manufacturing shopfloor operations at your disposal; up-to-date and historic, on material properties, supplier batches, on asset performance, quality, process settings and actuals and who was working at the line, what questions would you ask? Which insights result in improved shopfloor performance and added value? [...]
When talking about Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, alignment of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) immediately comes to mind as an enabler. Convergence of IT and OT is often challenging. Not just because of new and exciting technologies but also because of new ways of thinking and even new business models. This tends [...]
Bringing more automation to the shop floor eventually makes the shop floor more dependent on IT. IT systems provide the data to start production, or during production data is to be collected and recorded. An IT system downtime event or an interface that misbehaves brings questions such as; “How much system downtime do we accept [...]
To respond adequately to the ever faster changing demand of their customers, manufacturers need to have clear visibility and transparency of what happens on their shop floor. The fourth industrial revolution has shown the importance of accessing the right data for intelligent decision support. Similarly, a successful implementation of a Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solution [...]
Connected shop floor systems bring new options to streamline and integrate production, from product-design to prototype and from production planning to result. MES systems for example may be configured to load the correct machine CNC program, setting or digital instruction automatically when an operator changes over to a new production order. If [...]
Yes, shopfloor procedures have been documented. But are they followed? Always? When interviewing operators to design new IT systems for the shopfloor, you will find undocumented exceptions in work-processes like: “In that case I just run the material one more time through the operation” “If this happens we override the system with [...]
The fourth industrial revolution has shown the importance of accessing the right data for continuous improvement of our manufacturing performance. However, here there is more to it than just technology. IT is not a goal in itself. When selecting any new software application, it is critical to remember why the project was originally conceived to [...]
