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What is “Lean Production”?

Lean production is a production management method that aims to improve product quality by increasing production efficiency and reducing production costs. This method typically includes standardized production processes, optimized production equipment, and strict quality control. The goal is to achieve the lowest production costs while maintaining high-quality products.

Core principles of lean production

  • Process improvement: Ensuring smooth production processes and reducing waste and delays.
  • Standardization: Ensuring that all production processes are carried out according to uniform standards to improve production efficiency.
  • Quality control: Ensuring product quality through strict quality control.
  • Optimization of equipment: Ensuring optimal operation of production equipment to improve production efficiency.
  • Employee training: Ensuring that employees have the necessary skills and knowledge to improve production efficiency.
  • Data tracking: By recording and analyzing production data, continuously improving production processes and improving production efficiency can be achieved through MES.

By applying the above six principles, production efficiency can be improved, production costs can be reduced, and product quality can be enhanced.

How to reduce the eight types of waste emphasized in lean production through MES?

Eliminate overproduction

Through MES, real-time monitoring of production progress and work-in-progress (WIP) inventory can ensure that production is carried out according to the production plan and thereby eliminate overproduction

Reduce excess inventory

Through MES, real-time monitoring of WIP levels and production material levels can reduce excess inventory and lower inventory costs.

Reduce downtimMACHINEe

MES can be integrated with the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor equipment and overall operating conditions in real-time, detect and repair faulty equipment in a timely manner, and reduce production downtime.

Eliminate defects

Through MES, real-time monitoring of quality inspection status and defect items (such as IPQC, OQC, and FQC quality operations) and using in-line SPC charts and control rules, warnings can be issued for abnormal trends, and corresponding measures can be taken in a timely manner to eliminate and prevent defects, thereby reducing production costs.

Reduce unnecessary processing

MES can ensure standard operation processes in production through process control and operation management at each workstation to prevent quality abnormalities, achieve operational consistency, and avoid unnecessary processing behaviors that increase processing costs.

Reduce excessive waiting

Real-time monitoring of each workstation or equipment, work-in-progress and raw material inventory levels through MES ensures that personnel or equipment do not wait for materials, or that monitoring equipment repair progress, line change schedule, and production beat balance rate are balanced, allowing production plans and resource scheduling decisions to be adjusted to reduce excessive waiting.

Reduce excessive transportation

MES can provide instructions to logistics personnel and automated handling equipment (such as AGVs) for work-in-progress or raw material handling, ensuring that handling is carried out in a timely and accurate manner, reducing production line waiting times.

Reduce excessive or premature operations

Integration of MES and APS scheduling system ensures that production is started according to APS scheduling and that production is not overproduced during the process based on work order quantities.

Learn more about MES

MES can achieve the four goals of Lean Production

  • Increase production efficiency: MES can monitor production in real-time and quickly adjust the allocation of resources such as personnel, materials, and equipment when abnormalities occur or production goals cannot be met, thereby improving production efficiency.
  • Improve production quality: MES can monitor quality inspection results in real-time to ensure product quality and prevent defects by using In Line SPC Chart for real-time quality trend monitoring.
  • Reduce production costs: MES can collect, organize, and analyze production data, allowing managers to quickly make decisions and assess the effectiveness of those decisions, thus achieving a PDCA improvement cycle and reducing production costs.
  • Increase production flexibility: MES can quickly adjust production plans and allocate resources in response to market changes and customer demand.

Therefore, by using MES, the goals of Lean Production can be achieved, and the production process can be made more efficient.

Warehouse Management System

Improve warehouse operating efficiency and accuracy, enhance inventory management, reduce costs, and improve customer service.

What is WMS?

Warehouse Management System (WMS) is a software system specifically designed for managing warehouse operations. It helps businesses manage and schedule resources such as materials, racks, personnel, and equipment in the warehouse to improve warehouse operating efficiency and accuracy. With the continuous development of smart manufacturing technology, WMS is becoming increasingly widely used in the smart manufacturing field.

Why do we need WMS?

First, the production process of smart manufacturing products requires a large number of materials and components, which must be managed and scheduled in the warehouse. WMS can help businesses achieve real-time monitoring of materials and components in the warehouse and provide the materials needed for the production line. This can effectively reduce the material defect rate on the production line and improve production efficiency.

Second, WMS can help the development of smart warehousing. Smart warehousing is a warehousing method that combines IT and OT technologies, such as RFID, AGV, AI, etc., to achieve automated warehouse management. Smart warehousing can realize automatic identification, storage, retrieval, sorting, and storage of goods in the warehouse, greatly reducing labor costs and improving warehouse operating efficiency. WMS can assist in the operation of smart warehousing systems and provide data analysis and reporting to ensure effective scheduling and management of goods in the warehouse.

In addition, WMS can also be combined with smart logistics management. Through WMS, businesses can monitor the goods in the warehouse in real-time, ensure safe storage, and schedule and distribute them according to customer needs, effectively reducing logistics transportation costs and improving logistics transportation efficiency.

What are the benefits of implementing a WMS?

The implementation and use of a Warehouse Management System (WMS) can bring many benefits to a company, including:

  1. Increased efficiency: By using the system’s automation and real-time data recording, as well as handheld mobile devices such as PDAs, warehouse operations can be accelerated and production efficiency can be improved.
  2. Enhanced accuracy: Reduction of human errors and the provision of complete and real-time tracking of incoming and outgoing inventory records ensures the accuracy of goods and inventory information.
  3. Improved inventory management: Real-time inventory data and age analysis are provided to more effectively manage inventory.
  4. Cost reduction: System alerts for material expiry can reduce waste and increase production efficiency, resulting in cost savings.
  5. Improved customer service: Real-time information and tracking of goods are provided to meet customer needs.

In conclusion, the application of WMS in the field of smart manufacturing is of great significance. It can help companies achieve goals such as warehousing, logistics management, and production, and serves as a catalyst to assist companies in moving towards Industry 4.0. With the continuous development of technology, WMS will play a greater role in the field of smart manufacturing.

How can ESOP enhance the “smart manufacturing” process?

ESOP can reduce the production of defective products and prevent them from flowing to the next station.

SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) on the production line has always been a highly discussed topic. In the production process, operators follow the instructions in SOPs compiled by production technicians to guide their production behavior. When a product has a complaint or is defective, the relevant SOP is reviewed. The accuracy of SOPs is closely related to the production line’s output and yield. Lean production tells us that continuous improvement leads to perfection, which is a goal that the manufacturing industry continually pursues. However, traditional SOPs are recorded in production instructions and only teach production personnel to produce, so it is not known whether they are producing according to SOPs. With the recent trend of smart manufacturing integration, more and more companies are digitizing their SOPs, known as “ESOP (Electronic Standard Operating Procedures).”

So what is ESOP? As the name suggests, it is a digital version of SOPs, displayed on a screen for operators to follow. Traditional SOPs are unidirectional, and the operator’s correctness cannot be confirmed. ESOPs make SOP operations dynamic, and the interactive production model can monitor production behavior at any time, collect data generated by production behavior in real-time, and synchronize it with the database.

The merits of ESOP are as follows:

  1. Interactive production behavior: ESOP integrates human-machine interfaces, combines equipment and people to fully integrate production behavior, and synchronizes interactive production behavior during production operations, ensuring that production data meets the upper and lower limits of specifications.
  2. Correct and consistent production operations: Regardless of the operator’s skill level, as long as they follow the sequence of ESOP, they can produce consistently high-quality products.
  3. Real-time disclosure of production progress: Real-time collection of production progress information, and interaction with the MES (Manufacturing Execution System) system, returning real-time progress.
  4. Activating the MES (Manufacturing Execution System) system: ESOP allows the MES system to dynamically integrate SOP operations and interactive production models, combining required equipment for production, and further achieving a smart manufacturing production model.

Digital integration architecture of ESOP is as follows:

Through the interaction of documents and MES (Manufacturing Execution System), the process document data including the routing data, workstation data, and so on are planned in the MES system. Then, the production operations are implemented through various workstations, integrating relevant equipment data in real-time, synchronizing production behavior, and providing real-time feedback to the MES system on production progress and collected equipment data. In ESOP operations, when the collected data exceeds the upper and lower process control limits, the production status is immediately fed back to avoid the flow of defective products to the next workstation, ensuring that every workstation produces only qualified products.

How to build an intelligent production model through ESOP?

The following are the basic tasks that need to be completed first.

  1. Break down the SOP operation: integrate the SOP operation with equipment through digital means, not just on paper.
  2. Subdivide the production operation sequence.
  3. Plan the production model and create an interactive production model.

In summary, ESOP is a complete and mature intelligent production manufacturing model. By using the ESOP production model, productivity can be improved, output increased, production yield raised, and defective products reduced. Each product goes through multiple production processes, with transparent production information, real-time progress, and data-driven decision-making to achieve “intelligent manufacturing” and meet the needs of every customer.