1.7 Practical Examples of Potential Benefits

When an MES system is applied rigorously within a manufacturing organization, the presence of control cycles with short cycle times and the intensive interconnection of several classic disciplines such as control station, PDA, quality assurance, machine data collection, and so on, delivers a series of special potential benefits which can be listed here in a summarized form.

• Short-term scheduling takes capacity limitations into account and ensures a delivery date based on an up-to-date model of the capacity situation. This in turn makes possible a considerable improvement in on-time delivery performance in other words, customer satisfaction and employee motivation. With a simulation based on current production states the best possible alternatives can be selected with the aid of scenario creation. This can deliver the following advantages: better on-time delivery performance and improved capacity utilization while lead times and inventory levels can be reduced. Similar effects are generated by an up-to-date planning table which deploys ergonomically-presented order information to increase the scope of action of the planner or operations planner and scheduler.

• The coupling of PDA, MDC and planning table means that very realistic, real-time images in some cases even using automatic counter data acquisition can be included in a planning table and the above-mentioned effects will also result.

• Technology-oriented order and article statistics from PDA, MDC and quality assurance can bring to light eventual technical circumstances which result in higher costs due to unplanned consumption of material and/or time in the manufacturing...