Manufacturing companies are facing changing business dynamics, everywhere they look. Customers are not only demanding iindividualized products (market and lot sizes of 1) but they want those products delivered “yesterday”. This is driving manufacturers to have the ability and agility to adapt to variable configurations at the “drop of a hat”. These challenges are compounded by complexity of global manufacturing companies who have multiple locations with significant design and subassembly work outsourced, requiring close collaboration with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).
Gone are the days of engineering “throwing it over the wall” to manufacturing
To address these challenges, manufacturers need to bridge the gap between engineering and manufacturing. In a large company, it is not uncommon to have thousands of engineers designing new or updating existing products, and equally large numbers working in Manufacturing Engineering making sure that these products can actually be manufactured.
This requires:
- A collaboration across departmental and sometimes company boundaries to synchronize bill of materials and routings
- Monitoring of all shop floor operations with automatic issue detection, root cause analysis and decision support
- Streamlined operations to manage the work queue
- Tracking and tracing of individual parts and part-specific genealogy by shop floor item
- Improved working experience that provides all relevant information to ensuring complete data collection
Introducing SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for production engineering and operations
SAP recently announced
SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for production engineering and operations. This solution combines manufacturing engineering, extended production operations, and complex assembly solutions into a single, powerful, intuitive user experience across production planning and operational business processes.
Here is a quick overview of the capabilities now available:
Production Process Planning
- Ability to define production process on operation and operation activity level.
- Allocate Bill of Material (BOM) items with 3D visual support in routing creation
- Define all production relevant aspects, including tooling, inspection and certification requirements
- Create work instructions associated to the BOB that leverage 3D models.
Manufacturing Change Management
- Keep Change Record of all manufacturing artifacts in a change cycle in one place
- Track version controlled BOM and shop floor routing
- Create and display a worklist of new/modified Engineering-BOMs waiting for manufacturing handover
- Provide a “Change Impact” Analysis that identifies all objects potentially impacted by a change
- Leverage workflows to orchestrate changes between individuals and departments
BOM Management with Visual Enterprise Manufacturing Planner
- Enable the handover of engineering structure to manufacturing structure
- Support 3D model based visual handover, quantity-based non-visual handover, and hybrid scenarios
- Facilitates component allocation to routing operations
Production Order Management
- Monitor production process either on order or on operation level
- Automatically detects exceptions / issues
- Provide contextual information for root cause analysis and decision support
- Provide immediate actions in response to operator or system updates
Work Center Queue Management
- Lists all operations to be performed at a given work center
- Automatically pick the next operation to be started, based on order or operation status and other factors
- Actively monitors all in-process operations at the work center
Work Process Definition
- Perform and confirm activities on orders or on individual parts (serial numbers)
- Enforce execution and actions for reporting activity progress and status
- Support integrated visual work instructions
- Maintain genealogy and action logs
- Manage buyoffs
Benefits of Integrated Engineering and Manufacturing Processes
Manufacturing companies now can minimize production disruptions resulting from changed routings, work instructions, and production orders via proactive use of manufacturing impact analysis while using the latest engineering design and real-time enterprise data. Real-time analytics of comprehensive and time sensitive data results in quicker more accurate decisions. While improved collaboration across engineering and manufacturing result in higher quality, lower total cost of ownership and faster time to market.
