TerryCallahan.com
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Industrial Automation
I have been involved in the automation of industrial
operations since 1984. During that time I have seen huge gains in productivity acquired by
organizations that intelligently use automation. Unfortunately I have also seen many
examples of huge wastes of money and effort by organizations that throw technology at a
problem first, and think about it second. The key to success in industrial
automation is to be able to recognize the problem you are attempting to solve before you
put a solution in place. Sometime this is much more difficult than it sounds. The
information on this page can help.
Manufacturing Execution Systems
Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) provide a body of functionality that are aimed at improving the efficiency of a manufacturing enterprise. There is a good introduction to this subject at the indtech.net site. Unlike the higher level MRP or ERP systems which treat your plant as a black box, MES focuses on improving the capacity of your plant as a whole.
There is a large body of work that documents proven benefits gained from implementing MES systems. Some of these documented improvements are:
- Purchased material inventory reduced by 42 percent
- Production rate increased by 66 percent
- Assembly efficiency increased from 45 to 85 percent
- Delivery promises met on time increased from 60 to 90 percent
- Tripled gross margin
- Increased inventory turnover from 2.5 to 10 times per year
- Reduced work-in-process inventories by 20 percent
- Reduced Maintenance dispatch time by 40 %
- Reduced overall downtime by 7-10%
- Set-ups reduced by 30 percent
- Lead time reduced 50 percent
- Customer backlog reduced 90 percent
- Management scheduling time reduced 75 percent
- Theoretical production capacity increased 300 percent
Hard to believe? Check out MESA's White Paper No. 1
Plant Floor Monitoring
Currently I am serving as the Technical Leader of the Plant Floor Monitoring (PFM) group at EDS's Detroit Michigan based Manufacturing Service Center. PFM is a subset of the MES functionality, also referred to as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), that focuses on individual processes within the entire manufacturing enterprise. We provide data collection software for plant floor devices, and specialize in converting that data into information usable to improve these manufacturing processes.
The Plant Floor Monitoring group uses several of the leading data collection packages. Among these are:
- Wonderware
- Intellution
- FactoryLink
- Cellworks
- Setcim / InfoPlus.21
- Gensym
If you are interested in discussing what we can do to help you manufacturing enterprise become more profitable, please feel free to contact me at terry@terrycallahan.com.
Links to more Manufacturing information:
My Resume
Practices:
Just
in Time
NCMS
Best Practices
Manuf Auto & Tech Xfr.
Business Justification:
Systems:
Microsoft Manufacturing
Center for Manuf. IT
Real-Time Magazine
Windows NT as
Real-Time OS
Wonderware Technical
Support
Making SCADA a
sustainable competitive advantage
Send mail to webmaster@terrycallahan.com with questions
or comments about this web site.
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Last modified: January 31, 2006
