In Singapore, the Precision Engineering (PE) industry is the backbone of the manufacturing sector; it supports a large number of manufacturing industries such as Electronics, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology, Aerospace, Oil & Gas and Automotive. From our recent visits to companies in the PE industry, it was observed that given such a dynamic and stochastic manufacturing environment, most of these PE companies are still predominantly using Microsoft Excel as their planning & scheduling tool, shop floor tracking is normally performed manually through paper traveler, and production status is only updated at the end of the day or as and when demanded by customer. The common problems highlighted include inability to provide realistic delivery commitment, machine and manpower resources are not optimally utilized to fulfill customer orders, unacceptable order cycle time and lack of production visibility. Therefore, there is an increasing demand and impending need for a computerized integrated production planning/scheduling and shop floor tracking system. In this paper, a consortium approach for the development of an integrated production planning/scheduling and shop floor tracking system for the High-Mix Low-Volume (HMLV) PE environment is presented. An illustration through the implementation of the proposed system in a PE company is highlighted. With this system, companies would be able to improve their delivery performance through effective handling of ad-hoc customer orders and the ability to react to deviations or unplanned events in production.
This paper presents a hardware simulation study for an MRO shop and highlights the reduction in process time due to the introduction of RFID technology. Use of this technology will not only result in less number of process steps, but also enable the operation planner to get real time updates on the location and processing of various components scattered within the workshop. Each RFID tag will store its (read workshop component) own history, expiry date, time stamps. The RFID tag can be an electronic substitute for a physical piece of paper that accompanies a particular 'job' logging its details for the different processes that it undergoes. Thus, by scanning the tag, one can easily trace back the history of that job; and by making available this information at real time, a complete operation visibility is attained.
Index Termsequipment, maintenanceI.
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