Production Intelligence: Give way to more flexibility

Flexibility is an enormously crucial factor for success, in particular, if there is a high planning complexity with a high number of products and production steps while short-term disposition decisions must be made at the same time. Until now, companies have tried to adapt to this situation with PPS solutions or specific functions of ERP systems, although these are programmed for long-term planning and are not sufficiently suitable for short-term decisions. Hence, changes in production processes imply long reaction times and economic disadvantages. MES solutions as detailed production planning tools are slightly better suited for this problem. However, the classic technical MES approaches also only show limited effect as they are based on automation too much.

The Production Intelligence Philosophy is different. Its technical approach is to define all process elements of production sequences – from orders to operating instructions or quality definitions – as objects. These objects take attributes, thus creating a content level in which completely free linking is possible. That way, content becomes an integrating element. This makes possible an intelligent design of workflows because the production managers can decide flexibly how each single process is built from automated and manual components. Of course, all processes can be changed at any time to meet changing requirements.

The possibility of generating completely new information by content linking and to enable easy evaluations using attributes is another positive effect of the content method in Production Intelligence. This is also a benefit for the Continuous Improvement Processes (CIP). Until now, they often did not work properly because the human factor had not been sufficiently considered.

Customers opinion

"We now have reliable and repeatable operating figures, measurement values and records for the bottling plants with regard to the malfunction, cleaning and tooling times. The new machine and operating data recording system has already indicated one or the other weak link in the plant and, therefore, helped us to significantly increase the efficiency."

Bernd Mencke,
Project Manager, Beiersdorf AG