No abstract

In Singapore, the Precision Engineering (PE) industry is the backbone of the manufacturing sector; it supports a large number of manufacturing industries such as Electronics, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology, Aerospace, Oil & Gas and Automotive. From our recent visits to companies in the PE industry, it was observed that given such a dynamic and stochastic manufacturing environment, most of these PE companies are still predominantly using Microsoft Excel as their planning & scheduling tool, shop floor tracking is normally performed manually through paper traveler, and production status is only updated at the end of the day or as and when demanded by customer. The common problems highlighted include inability to provide realistic delivery commitment, machine and manpower resources are not optimally utilized to fulfill customer orders, unacceptable order cycle time and lack of production visibility. Therefore, there is an increasing demand and impending need for a computerized integrated production planning/scheduling and shop floor tracking system. In this paper, a consortium approach for the development of an integrated production planning/scheduling and shop floor tracking system for the High-Mix Low-Volume (HMLV) PE environment is presented. An illustration through the implementation of the proposed system in a PE company is highlighted. With this system, companies would be able to improve their delivery performance through effective handling of ad-hoc customer orders and the ability to react to deviations or unplanned events in production.

Manufacturingcompanies face frequently changing market demands, time-to-market pressure, continuously emerging new technologies and global competition. To quick respond to ever-changing environment, the intra-enterprise integration of key technology applications is one of the fundamental requirements of the management and supervisory control systems at plant level. This paper presents an event-driven service oriented framework within which main services provided by manufacturing systems at different levels can be effectively managed in a holistic manner. The framework is derived from the analysis of fundamental requirements of three key services of manufacture systems, namely DRAM (dynamic resource allocation and management), RCAR (realtime control and auto-recovery), PMDP (performance monitoring, diagnosis and prognosis). The conceptual designs of the main components of the framework are presented, which include information data model, event triggering and message exchange mechanism as well as Shop-floor Service Bus that enables service oriented architecture.

No abstract