Introduction to Production Management

Production Management ties your plant operations together by exchanging key production and status information with your customers and your internal business systems, as well as between your plant processes.

Production Management works between your control systems and planning systems. It gives the ability to track a product from raw material to your customer’s hands, to manage in-process inventory, to control the flow of a product in a multi-step process, send recipes to the control system, and track production against a schedule. Production Management can tell you exactly what is going on in your production processes at any given time, helping you eliminate static on the line.

  • Manufacturers produce product and consume raw materials by some discrete unit such as a Batch, Reel, Lot, Skid, Pallet, Tote, and Serial Number.

  • Manufacturers have multiple steps in their production processes and an example of that is in the paper industry. Pulping – Paper Making – Finishing – Converting.

  • Manufacturers need to provide traceability across multiple steps for Product recall, customer certificate of analysis, FDA regulations, and quality improvements.

  • Manufacturers produce product according to a schedule to make to an order or make to build current inventories.

When is Production Management Needed?

Production Management is needed if there is a need to:

  • Model a multi-step process

  • Track the Genealogy of a product through a multi-step process

  • Track raw materials

  • Barcode product

  • Accept and control a schedule

  • Track Production against a schedule

  • Associate Quality and Process data to customers

Production Management Features

  • Model and controls the flow of product from unit to unit through various paths among production equipment

  • Automatically drives product movement and genealogy from control system data

  • Captures production information at each unit manually or automatically from control system data

  • Captures consumption information at each unit manually or automatically from control system data and through calculations

  • Monitors key performance indicators of efficiency and production across the plant

  • Accepts a schedule and controls production around that schedule

  • Accepts customer, order, and shipment information for manufactured product

  • Handles the special requirements needed to schedule and track dimensional product

  • Attaches production identification to orders

  • Controls and reports orders

  • Automatically prints and scans bar codes

  • Manually drives product movement

  • Manages and reports in-process inventories

  • Creates ad-hoc reports on production, schedule, and genealogy issues

  • Creates Certificates of Analysis for customers (This is an Applied Solution available from our Professional Services Group. Please call 1-800-GEFanuc for more details.)

  • Publishes inventory, production, schedule and genealogy information to the web

  • Supports ActiveX controls for rapid deployment of solutions in any ActiveX container