Production Management
FactoryTalk ProductionCentre
Overview
FactoryTalk® ProductionCentre offers a unique solution set that integrates quality management and business analytics with paperless shop floor and repair execution. This integrated solution improves operational efficiencies while ensuring regulatory compliance and the highest levels of quality. This complete plant solution enables manufacturers to:
- Improve quality while reducing cost of quality
- Improve global operational efficiencies
- Reduce cost of regulatory compliance and minimize the impact of recalls
- Accelerate time-to-market
- Implement Six Sigma and lean initiatives
- Reduce manufacturing cycle times and inventory
- Improve customer service
- Share real-time data on quality and shop floor status
In addition to a set of standard applications, the integrated solution set includes reporting and analysis, configuration tools, integration tools and full data management.
- Shop Floor Control and Quality Assurance
- Create, change and track Work-In-Progress (WIP) for status and cycle times, through electronic travelers
- Enforce manufacturing best practices with dynamic workflow-based routings
- Track production at serialized unit, lot (including lot splits and merges) and ERP work order level for as-built configurations
- Maintain complete device and batch history records of operations, operators, equipment, components (supplier, assembled and consumed), rework and defects
- Review common repairs for a defect and associate repairs with defects
- Monitor out-of-bounds conditions in real-time and respond to alerts
- Display supporting documents such as checklists and work instructions electronically
- Support RFID and bar-code scanning
- CAPA and Complaint Handling
- Define configurable workflows
- Analyze root cause and failures
- Prepare regulatory reports of adverse events
- Associate Complaints, CAPAs, Production and Repair records within a single system
- Receive alerts, escalations and notifications when items are due or overdue
- Retrieve complete audit trail of events including electronic signatures and approvals
- Assign tasks and deadlines
- Returned Merchandise Authorization (RMA) and Repair
- Manage factory and field repair orders with multiple return scenarios including advanced exchange, return to factory, depot repair, return for credit and upgrade
- Identifies and tracks lots, units, account, site, contact, warranty and contract information
- Tracks repair orders and operations from receipt to shipment, including visibility into WIP, queue times, cycle times and throughput
- Provides the ability to revive "as-built" and "as-maintained" history from global operations
- Provides most common repairs for a given defect based on past repair history
- Maintains single unit, lot or mass repair processes, including inspection, troubleshooting, defect tracking, labor tracking, resolution management, ECO upgrades, part consumption and other features
- Provides field failure feedback to engineering, manufacturing and NPI for improvements in processes and quality on current and future products
- Supplier Manager
- Obtain full visibility, inspect and track defects of incoming supplier raw material, components or assemblies
- Test and measure incoming materials (IQA/SQI) from suppliers
- Evaluate supplier quality
- Apply sampling plans including electronic skip lot, ANSI1.4, ANSI1.9, Dodge Romig and continuous sampling plans
- Trace supplier materials through entire production operations, including tracking back to lots and parts upon assembly, repair or disassembly
- Analytics
- Optimize manufacturing and repair operations through personalized notifications
- Take control of operations through real-time and historical reporting in areas such as WIP, yield, defects, repair and genealogy
- Make fact-based decisions through ad-hoc analysis that identifies root causes
ProductionCentre MES enforces manufacturing processes along the production line, eliminating mistakes before they can occur. By systematically applying manufacturing rules, companies eliminate operator guesswork and ensure that operators adhere to consistent manufacturing processes. As operators discover defects, the affected unit or lot can be automatically re-routed for repair.
At each step along the production line, the unit or lot inputs are collected. This detailed level of data enables companies to monitor trends using the Statistical Process Control (SPC) functionality. The SPC application identifies out-of-bounds conditions and provides alerts to operators, engineers or managers when violations occur. This real-time monitoring provides yet another mechanism to ensure that quality standards are incorporated into manufacturing.
Shop Floor and Quality applications allow you to:
CAPA (Corrective Action/Preventive Action Management) and Complaint Handling solutions from ProductionCentre have helped numerous companies reduce the cost of compliance. CAPA and Complaint Handling deliver closed-loop process management. All the CAPAs and complaints are stored electronically so that they are readily accessible across an organization.
CAPA and Complaint Handling applications allow you to:
Many manufacturers and contract repair operators rely upon world class repair service to differentiate themselves, enabling them to win new customers and to retain existing customers. To deliver superior customer service in a timely fashion, repair centers must have easy access to the unit or lot history, including parts used and previous repair history.
The ProductionCentre paperless RMA solution allows you to:
Globalization and offshore outsourcing have changed how products are manufactured. Supply chains are more complex than ever. Many manufacturers though are still relying on outdated paper-based systems and institutional memory to manage supplier quality, despite the fact that supplier quality is a critical determinant of the quality of the finished good. ProductionCentre solutions provide visibility and traceability across the entire manufacturing process to meet manufacturing goals.
ProductionCentre Supplier Manager allows you to:
ProductionCentre provides the industry's first integrated enterprise alerting, reporting, analysis and dashboarding solution for single and multi-site manufacturing organizations. The ProductionCentre analytics solution helps manufacturers identify and understand key operations performance issues across their global manufacturing enterprise.
Managers can use these key performance indicators (KPIs) to make changes on the production floor. What are the most common defects? What is my cycle time? What is my first-pass yield and how does it compare against prior periods?
ProductionCentre integrated analytics allow you to: