Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1534953
Now, you can optimize your workflow and ensure that the person with the right qualification is at that station when a particular job comes through. You route it to another workflow to ensure that it gets the proper qualification there. Also, it can help manage when your teams need training, for example. Exactly, and it's not only when teams need training. It is first about ensuring that adequately trained or even certified people are executing a certain process, action, or activity, especially in regu- lated markets like medical, automo- tive, and even aerospace and defense. It is essential, and actually regulatory to have a specifically certified person exe- cute a certain activity. A good MES can control those things. From a capacity perspective, if I have a series of planned manufactur- ing orders or activities that need to be executed, by having this people-related capability, the MES can understand and know whether I have adequate means to produce and deliver on time. Do I have the people with the required quali- fications or certification? This supports the decision-making process: "Okay, I probably need to send more people to this training because I don't have enough qualified to work on this job." It gives you traceability as well, so we know the line, operator, and level of certification, and the inventory control. Yes, exactly. When you plan the sequencing of the manufacturing orders in your MES, you include the ERP sys- tem, which provides what you are pur- chasing, your suppliers, and where they are located. When you plan a cer- tain number of orders to be produced on your shop floor, you need to know whether you have the necessary mate- rials. We need to consume and process this inventory efficiently, while at the same time telling the material manage- ment system or the purchasing system, for example, "Hey, I'm running short on inventory here. Please go ahead and buy me more from suppliers X, Y, and Z." You need to know the inventory required to produce a certain quantity of a spe- cific part, 50 steps ahead of where you are, will be there. Having a deep level of understanding of inventory at each workstation, place, machine, and even at each tool is essential for execution and optimization. It is this level of value an organization gains from investing in an MES that is fully integrated and deployed. I also think you can optimize the work- flow for minimum tool changes from one job to another. That is exactly right. It is part of the sequencing and scheduling of activities. You know that you have a certain point of entry at a certain point in time. You know that the machine has this partic- ular setup. Ideally, by knowing that the machine setup is X and identifying the inventory needed for that specific activ- ity on the schedule, you can determine the setup or changeover time from a machine perspective. Those are things that create downtime. By knowing all those variables and doing effective scheduling of activities, MES can facili- tate maximum equipment utilization. Sometimes, people complain, "My machine is stopped and it should never stop." But it stopped exactly when the system identified it would due to chang- ing over to another setup or any other valid reason. If you were doing this man- ually, there would be less efficiency in this process, as the process would not anticipate when the machine would naturally be waiting for materials. Those components and variables with the complex algorithms that MES takes into consideration today, and the intel- ligence to propose optimizations of " " It is this level of value an organization gains from investing in an MES that is fully integrated and deployed.