Connect Corporate Management and Shop Floor Production with ERP

Phil Black - PII Editor 07/07/2015

213 5 minutes read

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By Andrew Jewell, Mattec MES Expert, Epicor Software

It’s a continuing problem in many industries – corporate management and shop floor production seem to operate in entirely separate worlds. Although they work for the same company, these two different departments can often be at odds with each other simply through a lack of cohesion. However, it doesn’t have to be like this. There are several steps a business in the plastics and rubber industry can take to connect these two worlds, bringing management to the shop floor and vice versa.

Cohesive IT solutions

The plastic and rubber industry faces many issues today due to a lack of integration between different IT systems. This means that there is often an unnecessary gap between production, management and industry specific solutions. IT investment for the shop floor is also met with resistance because senior managers have historically had difficulties seeing the return on their investment. Another challenge is a traditional lack of understanding and knowledge in how to make shop floor data collection accurate and effective, and how to leverage it in order to support the business objectives.

By investing in the right cohesive and seamless IT solutions and educating the staff, organisations in the plastic and rubber industry could save both time and money as well as improve their customer relationships and increase productivity, resulting in better overall growth and profitability.

Production and management – worlds apart

For most plastic companies production and corporate management are dependent on each other but often disconnected. Each uses its own particular non-connected IT systems and bases its decisions on different types of information. This is a problem with a number of implications such as the inaccurate monitoring of scrap materials, or the incorrect recording of setup materials. The knock-on effect of this can be inaccuracies in ERP inventory counts and material stocks, as well as late shipments or delivery issues. All these poorly controlled situations are compounded to ultimately result in a significant increase in manufacturing costs, a higher proportion of customer related issues and follow-on problems.

An integrated, yet independent real-time manufacturing execution (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can, in combination, provide businesses with a simple solution, presenting them with information that they otherwise would not have. Real-time data from both systems give quicker and more accurate visibility across all the plant and all the systems, a greater accuracy in inventory counts in the ERP as well as a better real-time viewing and understanding of progress of WIP (Work in Process), real delivery schedules and so on.

British challenges

Recent Official National Statistics (ONS) showed that the manufacturing output in Britain had increased 0.4 per cent from February to March 2015, while total production output increased by 0.5 per cent within the month. Rubber and plastic products were one of the sectors that showed positive growth.

However, even though the industry has seen increased growth, the manufacturing sector still remains far smaller than it was before the financial crash in 2008. In order for UK manufacturers to get back on track, they need to assess their current processes and make a call on whether or not implementing more modern, efficient systems will help them build on this positive growth trend.

MES for immediacy and quality

The MES solution should automatically collect data from the plant operations in real-time and instantly make it available to the ERP system for analysis. This can, for instance, allow production bottlenecks to be anticipated and averted before they materialise and before they create follow-on and more costly situations. Real-time monitoring gives an immediate understanding of what is happening on the shop floor instead of needing to wait for an evaluation at the end of the shift or end of the working day.

This type of real-time information exchange helps businesses to immediately implement either immediate and/or longer-term changes to improve productivity and performance. A further optional productivity enhancing solution that will allow greater control of product quality and consistency is the ability to monitor key processes on plastics converting machines i.e. pressures, temperatures etc., to ensure that everything is being produced according to correct standards and process requirements to achieve “Zero Defect” manufacturing status.

ERP for planning and analysis

The production information transmitted from the ERP system i.e. works orders, is also of immediate benefit to managers that can access data from the MES directly to analyse scrap/waste, downtimes and other key performance indicators. This helps to simultaneously identify potential improvement measures; from a strategic and cost perspective in the ERP and from an operational perspective in the MES; and then to better co-ordinate and implement improvements. Some examples of this can include improving cycle times, increasing the productivity of individual production lines, automatic part qualification through real-time process monitoring and/or improving production scheduling.

The traditional solution for this is to collect data manually – a laborious, lengthy and invariably inaccurate process!

High demands and tolerances

The plastics and rubber industry has scientific processes with very high demands and tolerances that also need to be managed by modern IT solutions. Epicor has worked with a large number of businesses in plastics and rubber during the many years of servicing the industry and have seen some developments and improvements in these areas during this time.

We believe these issues can be avoided and/or improved upon but the businesses need to put pressure on their ERP and MES providers to deliver more cohesive and seamless solutions for the industry.

Questions to ask

The questions IT solution buyers should ask themselves are – will the ERP system provide standard solutions to all the nuances that occur within the industry that we operate within? This question will help them to determine if there will be a need to heavily customise, use work-arounds, and/or buy additional third-party software solutions (that will hopefully allow relatively easy integration) to provide usable solutions.

Buyers should be looking for both (combined) MES and ERP solutions that caters to industry specific nuances and includes industry-specific terminology such as “cycle-times”, “tooling”, “cavitation” etc. The lack of this typically causes issues in easily and correctly setting up standard systems and invariably can very easily become costly for businesses.

Buyers should especially look for a solution that has the “plastic industry” terminology built-in to the ERP and MES solution and is significantly “localised” to the process that it is being applied to. By not using a system that is tailored for the specific industry with e.g. key niche functions like “Family Moulding” software, the need for customisations or workarounds (if even possible) can become very expensive and even result in partial usage where certain elements of the ERP software become unusable.

It is also very important that the solution can record the details by Product ID, by Job Number, and by Tool ID in order to provide standard traceability and accountability. The solution should be able to monitor KPIs and include direct “to machine” interfaces to extract data. This means that minimal/no labour is required in the transfer of real-time and accurate production and/or process data from machines to centralised MES and ERP databases, resulting in more accurate and timely results and information being presented to the users who can then analyse that data to improve overall shop-floor productivity and plant profitability.

Connecting the two worlds

At a first glance, these investments in MES and ERP often appear to be more of a technical nature, but recent developments of these IT solutions now enable businesses, for the first time, to automatically connect management with operational processes, all the way down to the level of individual machines on the shop floor.

One of the immediate benefits is that this makes critical production data available at the click of a button across the plant and across all users; there is no further need for the laborious task of searching manually for the causes of excessive energy usage, scrap, downtimes or quality deficiencies.

If companies invest more in the shop floor and seamlessly integrate their systems (in real-time), they will take their business to a higher operational level, becoming a world class manufacturer. By modernising the IT solutions within their businesses, they will become significantly more responsive, efficient and profitable, ultimately leading to business growth.