Manufacturing Technology Today

Shankar Chakraborty ¹, Diganta Tah ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Production Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata - 700 032, IN
2 Cognizant Technology Solutions, Salt Lake, Kolkata, IN

Abstract

In present-day manufacturing environment, there is an ardent need to have effective and smooth flow of information through all the departments of an organization. In this paper, a maiden venture is taken to design and develop a Supply Chain Management (SCM) module for streamlining all the procurement and inventory related activities of a manufacturing organization. With the help of the developed module, the order to delivery cycle time for the products can be reduced considerably while improving the customer responsiveness that is found to be the crucial success factor in today's competitive market. The developed module is successfully implemented in a simulated manufacturing environment to test its utility.

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Shankar Chakraborty ¹, Diganta Tah ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Production Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700032, IN
2 Cognizant Technology Solution, Salt Lake, Kolkata-700091, IN

Abstract

This paper deals with the development of a hybrid prototype system, which would act as an integrated real time decision support system for resource planning and scheduling. The hybrid system would be the application of continuous improvement, with elements of Total Quality Management and Close Loop Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules. A combination of the above two capabilities would help in deploying a hybrid approach of managing the manufacturing activities through 'Advanced Planning and Scheduling' (APS) mechanism. The optimised quantities of products to be manufactured have to be decided after passing through a decision support model. This model has been primarily based on linear programming (LP) method, which would consider the finite capacity of resources.

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Shankar Chakraborty ¹, Diganta Tah ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Production Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata - 700 032, IN
2 Cognizant Technology Solutions, Salt Lake, Kolkata, IN

Abstract

A real time maintenance management system is observed to be the way to meet the dynamic workloads in present day manufacturing environment. The paper focuses on the development of such a system for integrated functioning of a manufacturing organization. The developed computerized system will essentially replicate the processes of a traditional ERP system, collect the real time data, explode the data against the timeline, help in balancing the use of limited resources against the timeline and finally give output in the form of preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance work orders The system is tested in simulated manufacturing environment and the flexibility of the developed system is also proved.

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Shankar Chakraborty ¹, Diganta Tah ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Production Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700032, IN
2 Cognizant Technology Solutions, Salt Lake, Kolkata-700091, IN

Abstract

Continuous increase in the competition and customer expectations has directed the manufacturing operations in an organization to focus on quality related matters and statistical techniques so as to interpret the data as captured at various stages of manufacturing. The developed advisory decision support system uses generic methods to address various problems of quality control and would analyze the enormous volume of data as generated and aid in making quality related decision. In conventional statistical process control applications, the analyzed results have to be interpreted by very experienced operators or quality control engineers. In automated unmanned manufacturing environments, based on Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), this has been a major drawback. This inherent bottleneck has been overcome by incorporating interpretation expertise in the system. The developed system would help in configuring various rule sets, on violation of which various exceptions would be generated by the system and the expert system would advice for appropriated remedial actions, hence, would act as an advisory support system. The concerned quality control engineers could interactively change these rule definitions. Subsequently, the possible causes of the violations of various rules would be configured as Violation Causes. The set of causes of the rule violation would be associated with a certain type of variable.

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