A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is any structured process that monitors, tracks, documents, and controls the process of manufacturing goods from raw materials to finished products. It uses data to provide information on the production progress.
Even if you didn't know this acronym you likely already have a MES in place in your organization no matter how large or small. A MES can really be anything that meets the definition above. It could be manual recording of data from paper travelers, it could be Excel based end of the process record keeping, it could even be a dry erase job board on the manufacturing floor. What do all of these MES practices have in common? No direct insight to job reporting as it's happening and lengthy record keeping sometimes days after a job is completed. Not to mention never knowing during the process where machine breakdowns occured so you can quickly react to the flow of jobs or how much scrap is being produced due to bad batches or poor raw material. Resulting in a lot of too little too late analysis and reactions.
We also know other things happen when you are working with manual entry paper travelers. Let's take a look at this common paper traveler:
Not only can the writing be sometimes illegible, but you may also lose this in transistion from one station to the next, forget to fill something out correctly, or even spill a tasty caffinated beverage on the work order. Which leaves data entry with a really fun job of sorting through (sometimes hours a week for one person) this sort of MESs. See what I did there?
Now the benefit of a digital MES like the new Prodsmart software from Autodesk is aimed at alleviating a lot of these issues and providing even more benefit during the manufacturing process to inventory visibility, traceability, job tracking, and even quality control.
This doesn't mean you go completely paperless though. Prodsmart can create barcode or QR code sheets to follow a job from one station to another, but all the recording is performed digitally with a terminal at the workstation or worker devices (like $200 tablets). These links also provide drawings, spec sheets, work instructions, data sheets, and model interrogation via Fusion Teams (included will all PDMC and Fusion 360 licenses).
With workers entering data from receiving all the way to shipping insight into a range of data points provides a wealth of information to decision makers and schedulers.
Here we are looking at the current open production orders. Production orders can be manually created here or we can import a product from Fusion Teams (also able to connect with Vault Professional) and create a production order for it.
Prodsmart even has production scheduling tools to help you organize your shop floor. As you can see from the images here, there are a lot of built in modules that seem like a lot at first, but not everything needs to be utilized to be a successful MES.
The analytics and reporting capability of Prodsmart is a tremendous asset to have for your manufacturing processes. Identifying where we might need to retrain operators, improve our work instructions, etc, all becomes apparent when we have accurate real time data to analyze.
In the end Prodsmart can help transform your current MESs into a highly functional Manufacturing Execution System and evolve your team from Charlie Clipboards into Tom Tablets.
Implementation of Prodsmart can be as quickly as 3 hours to get your first product in Prodsmart and start tracking your job progress. Make sure you reach out to your IMAGINiT sales representative for more information and you can also sign up for a free 14-day trial here: https://app.prodsmart.com/signup
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