Production planning and progress tracking in the machining industry-APS system application

As we all know, it is difficult to prepare production plans in the machining industry, which is determined by the characteristics of the machining industry. It is not only difficult to prepare plans, but also to track production progress, rework defective products, and manage scrap. Many factories do not have precise plans. It is up to the workshop to decide what to do in the previous process, and the PMC department only tracks the progress. If the customer was in a hurry, he would go to the workshop to urge him. However, the customer did not urge him, and a large amount of work-in-progress piled up in the workshop.

In recent years, some companies with a high degree of informatization have introduced MES, and some companies have begun to introduce APS. However, in the mechanical processing industry with the most complex production processes, the proportion of MES introduction is not high, and even fewer companies have introduced APS. Except for some smaller products that can be tracked by buckets or trays, most larger machine-processed products cannot be pasted with barcodes, nor are they suitable for engraving barcodes. Quality inspection is a manual operation, and MES is the most widely used. The code scanning method is not suitable for the machine processing industry. And without planning and simply tracking progress, companies will still feel that the plan is chaotic.

For machining companies, we recommend an accurate planning + simple reporting method, which is low-cost and more practical.

The production plan of machining has the following characteristics:

1. Products have many processing steps. Most products have 10-20 steps. Some products need to go through dozens or hundreds of steps, making progress tracking more cumbersome.
2. There are many types of equipment. The processing time of each process varies greatly. Some processes can be completed in dozens of minutes, such as cleaning and deburring, while some processes require more than ten hours.
3. Processes such as heat treatment have the problem of combining furnaces. When combining furnaces, the capacity of each furnace needs to be considered.
4. Some processes with a large number of equipment and long time need to be divided into several machines for parallel production.
5. If the processing time of the front and back processes is too long, batch transfer issues need to be considered.
6. The workshop production scheduling is flexible, the order of some processes can be exchanged, and the production processes can be merged or decomposed according to different machines. For example, car one and car two can be made separately by two pieces of equipment, or another advanced processing equipment can be used to make the car at one time.
7. It is difficult to collect basic data. Planners sometimes cannot determine which machine a product is suitable for. Only the workshop director or specific operating employees understand
8. There are an unusually large number of workshops, and the actual production schedule is often very different from the plan.

Based on the particularity of machining, many people will find it difficult to introduce APS in machining companies. The time calculated by APS is too precise to be executed. The equipment selected may not be the most suitable, and workshop production cannot be carried out completely according to the APS schedule.

The above situations do exist. We have introduced APS to several machining plants this year. Workshop production is actually very flexible. The workshop director and operators are adjusting the plan at any time, but the overall operating effect of the system is very good, and customers are also very satisfied. Summarizing the actual operating experience of customers, we summarized several basic principles for the operation of APS+MES in machining enterprises:

Basic data is accurate:

Accurate basic data is the basis of management. Basic data refers to the process model in APS, including machinery and equipment, the production process of each product, the equipment available for each process and cycle time, etc. The workload of data collection is relatively large, but this part of the work can be done as long as it is well organized.

The overall plan is reasonable:

Based on the above basic data, APS can come up with a plan that looks reasonable:

1. The process sequence is correct and the machine selection is reasonable;
2. The scheduling order satisfies delivery priority and first-in-first-out;
3. Equipment load balancing allows machines to be utilized reasonably if the production process allows;
4. Correctly handle the quantity of work in progress, inventory, and defective products;
5. Can evaluate the delivery time of each order;

Flexible execution in the workshop:

In a machining factory, the plan arranged by APS is a guiding plan, and the workshop cannot be required to fully implement the plan arranged by the system, otherwise it will definitely not be implemented. Within the scope of the overall progress, the workshop director can flexibly adjust the plan according to the actual situation, including: changing the allocated equipment, exchanging the processing sequence, and flexibly controlling the processing quantity. These changes are based on experience in the field.
If there is no accurate production plan and it is completely up to the workshop to decide what to do, it will be difficult to control the progress and delivery date. It will be difficult for the planning department and managers to grasp the production time and delivery date of each order.

Report work promptly and accurately:

Since the actual execution of the workshop is somewhat different from the plan scheduled by APS, without the support of the work reporting system, APS cannot be implemented in the machinery factory at all.

Very few machinery factories have introduced MES systems, but the problem of reporting work must be solved. PlanMateAPS uses a mobile APP to solve the problem. The plan arranged by APS will be released to the mobile phone according to the equipment shift. There is no need to print Excel. The production plan will be pushed to the mobile phone. After workers go to work, they can see today’s production tasks of each equipment on the mobile phone. After production is completed, they only need to select the order process. , enter the completed quantity to complete the work report. If adjustments are needed, for example, if they want to change the machine to do it, or pull over tomorrow’s order, workers can apply to modify the plan. After the workshop director reviews and approves, the modification will take effect immediately.

Piece rate management:

How to ensure that workers will report to work seriously? Incentives and compulsions are needed to implement them seriously.
Most machinery factories use piece-rate wages, and the reported work data is collected monthly and can be used to calculate wages. Who operates which machine, what products are produced, and the number of good/defective products are all recorded. Since the reported data is used to calculate wages, workers will naturally take it seriously. In addition, the software has a self-checking and error-correcting function, which can prevent mistakes during operation, avoid over-reporting and under-reporting, and also save the time of manual repeated checking and calculation of wages.

Daily update schedule:

Read yesterday’s reporting data into APS every day, and adjust the plan according to the actual progress. Completed tasks will be removed, unfinished tasks will be postponed, and urgent tasks will be advanced. Re-release the plan, the latest production plan can be received immediately on the mobile phone, and the workshop will start production according to the latest plan.

The production plan and progress will be published on the WEB. Personnel in other departments of the company can see the estimated delivery date, production plan, and current progress of each order in real time. The plan and progress are clear and transparent. There is no need to call every day to ask questions, and there is no need to always ask for reports from PMC.