Efficient, Comprehensible Planning Strategies on the Shop Floorloor

From now on, the production control of the Manufacturing Execution Systems of GUARDUS Solutions AG from Ulm provides a module for the planning of the sequence of production orders. The new graphical GUARDUS MES Planning Table offers the user everything he/she needs for a reliable but still flexible implementation of his/her short or long-term strategies on the shop floor such as smooth communication with the leading ERP system, automated but also manual planning of production orders on various machines or at various workplaces, simple modification of sequence priorities as well as visualisation and consideration of the current production situation in real-time. The result: perfect symbiosis between the intelligent planning logic through mathematical algorithms and the individual operator’s competence through manual interference.

By means of the new GUARDUS MES planning table, in the future, the industrial companies will be better able to carry out their shop floor strategies for the manufacturing processes with optimum operations and equipment. The basis for this is the intelligent integration framework of the MES. High-performance interfaces to all marketable ERP systems enable you to take over the frame data of the pending production orders and to plan them by means of graphical and mathematical support. Due to the Heller-Logemann algorithm used for this, multi-level production orders will cascade on various production units (machines, production lines, manual workplaces etc.), whereas the actual availability and tooling as well as possible deadline conflicts are always taken into consideration. It is also possible either to prioritise identical work operations by means of the start and delivery date defined by the ERP system, or to split manufacturing steps in a parallel and sequential way. Moreover, in order to provide an optimum planning of order sequences, that is, a minimum of idle phases, the GUARDUS MES Planning Table also uses all the relevant data of the operation calendar as well as information about setup/shutdown time, waiting time, and potential overlapping. The integrated database of the MES additionally provides PDA and MDA information about the current situation of the production or machine schedule.

The new module allows not only the efficient, automatic planning of the order sequences, but also the manual intervention of the user either by moving the orders via drag & drop or via correction of data in the order details by means of double-clicking. During this process, the user can freely change the scale in the planning visualisation (either in table or in a graphical form, including the traffic-light function) at any time. The scale goes from month, week, and shifts up to hours and minutes. The GUARDUS MES Planning Table has been conceived as a process-oriented tool which also visualises the subsequent processes, and thus, the comparison between the plan and the actual situation regarding the machine status, production situation, and work progress. Manufactured units, remaining time or exceeding of the deadline can also be represented graphically or in table form.