It always surprises me when I visit a shop floor for the first time and realize that some of our nation’s manufacturers are still trying to compete in the 20th century. They might be making great products. They might even make them on time with minimum defects. But the fact remains that somewhere else in the world, somebody is tooling up to make the same great products, but in an up-to-date, fully-integrated, automated and paperless environment that blows older manufacturing methods right out of the proverbial duck pond.
I can hear some of you laughing – there he goes rambling on about paperless business systems again – we’ve been hearing that for 20 years now. But the use of paper really is a good indicator of where a manufacturer stands in the struggle for competitive edge, because modern manufacturers leverage data to create efficiencies and profit, and data on paper is almost impossible to leverage. Do you think the potential disruptors in your market will use paper for … well … anything?
Trust me – they won’t. To run a profitable shop floor these days requires visibility and control, which is why companies are turning to manufacturing execution systems (MES). An integrated MES has so many advantages that it’s hard to know where to begin. Off the top of my head, an MES can minimise overruns, bottlenecks, downtime and waste, while monitoring and reporting on employee and machine performance. With the resulting gains in productivity, resource, energy and human capital use, the effects of an MES are closely tied to increased profitability. As an added bonus, gains in agility and flexibility help companies thrive, even as market conditions change.
All that, however, is just the start of what can be done with SYSPRO’s Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) module, which offers the full range of MES capabilities, along with a host of real-time functions and interfaces that can truly bring a manufacturing facility into the 21st century.
SYSPRO MOM connects everything on the shop floor – machines, equipment, people and devices – for previously unthinkable control and data reporting, without the need for manual inputs. It’s hard to overstate the importance of real time visibility when it comes to shop floor realities such as start/stop and downtime, job assignment, operation status, machine status, parts count, component count and performance issues.
No matter what your shop floor looks like – continuous, discrete, or mixed mode – MOM was designed to collect and track data from employees and equipment in real-time. For managers, MOM provides:
- Advanced planning and scheduling (APS)
- 360 degree visibility and manufacturing analytics.
As well as extremely valuable metrics such as:
- OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness),
- TEEP (Total Effective Equipment Performance) and
- OLE (Overall Labor Effectiveness).
Using these measures to optimize efficiency and maximize productivity allows for the most efficient use of available capacity, which, naturally, leads to improved profitability. And for those manufacturers who are investing in automation, MOM is an enormous help in optimizing automated and robotic systems until they provide maximized gains at minimal cost.
There are too many facets to SYSPRO MOM to approach in a single blog. If you’d really like to know what a state-of-the-art, Industry 4.0-capable MES can do for your shop floor and company, please give us a call. We will be more than happy to demonstrate the ROI that SYSPRO MOM can provide.
