Manufacturing Solutions

Software solutions specific to industrial/manufacturing
businesses (ex. MES, ERP, BES)

Document Management has evolved from a simple imaging and retrieval system
to a system that can:

  • Capture and store content with different document types (ex. MS Word,
    PDF, Excel, HTML, etc.)
  • Search/index content within the documents themselves.
  • Allow metadata to be manually entered and/or automatically extracted from documents to help searching and indexing
  • Version Control: save multiple versions of content over time for review and comparison
  • Audit Trail: keeping a read-only record of access, viewing, and changes within the system
  • Granular Security: show/hide documents, folders, and functions based on a
    given user’s privileges
  • Document Retention Control: determine when a document should be
    re-reviewed/upgraded or destroyed
  • Collaboration: providing additional tools (ex. Tasks, Workflow for review and approval, Wikis, Libraries, etc.) to allow multiple people to efficiently collaborate

Manufacturing Systems and Applications

Manufacturing systems connect the plant floor with the business. We design, integrate and support applications such as:

  • Enterprise Resource Planning (ex. Estimating, Scheduling, Forecasting, MRP)
  • Job Management Systems (ex. Estimating, Budgeting, Cost Tracking, Billing)
  • Manufacturing Execution Systems
  • Batch Manufacturing Systems (ex. Recipe Management, Execution, and Reporting)
  • Lab Management Systems
  • Document Management (ex. Versioning, Approval, Review, Workflows, Retention, Collaboration, Tagging and Searching)
  • Quality Systems
  • Event-driven Reporting (ex. Production, EPA, Title V, Compliance, Exception)
  • Process and Production Alerting (ex. automatic notification of process / product upsets with escalation as email, text message, and/or voice)
  • Downtime Analysis Systems (ex. automatic and manual capture of downtime reasons and durations with Pareto and Root Cause analysis)
  • Predictive Maintenance (ex. run hours tracking)
  • Inventory Management
  • Product Genealogy and Lot Tracking
  • Overtime Management
  • Control System Interface
  • Plant Site Digital Dashboard
  • Job Management
  • Material Balance and Recycle Accounting
  • Environmental Reporting
  • Vendor Managed Inventory (Remote Inventory Management)
  • Demand Forecasting
  • Rail Car Tracking
  • Manual Remote Data Entry Systems

Downtime and OEE Analysis

Downtime analysis turns stops and slowdowns into data that can be acted on. A typical system covers:

  • Event capture: stops detected automatically from control system or historian signals, with start time, end time and duration.
  • Reason capture: operators assign or confirm a reason from a structured reason list, with comments where needed.
  • Metrics: availability, performance and quality combined as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), plus counts, durations, MTBF and MTTR.
  • Pareto and root cause analysis: rank losses by line, shift, product and reason so the largest losses are addressed first.
  • Reporting: shift, daily and trend reports, and dashboards for operators and managers.

Downtime events can be recorded alongside process data in a data historian, for example as event frames in the AVEVA PI System, so that every stop can be reviewed with the process conditions around it.

Although one should consider 3rd party off-the-shelf solutions first, custom software can be cost-justified and provide benefits beyond existing solutions:

  • Initial prototype
  • Competitive advantage
  • Special requirements
  • Tight specifications/compliance

We work with our customers to make the best choice for their needs and establish metrics based on their business goals to assure success!