The importance of proper plant orchestration to be more competitive
by Lantek
Advanced Manufacturing
Share:
In an environment where everything is increasingly interconnected and processes are fed from this exchange of data, the orchestration of the systems in a factory is becoming ever more important. This refers to the need to organize, order and coordinate production within the company, a balanced distribution of tasks in which every element must participate and contribute: people, machines and software.
Like an artistic choreography, where the dancers move to the beat of the musicians, who themselves are directed by the baton of the conductor, all manufacturing requires a harmonious design of processes in which employees are one hundred percent involved and committed to achieving efficient, agile and flexible production in order be competitive in this era of digitalization. An orchestration capable of adapting to the change of pace required by the customization of products and ever shorter delivery times, using increasingly sophisticated instruments such as Big Data, Machine Learning or the Internet of Things (IoT) to become part of that elite group that is leading digital transformation towards Industry 4.0.
Our Advanced Manufacturing proposal offers data analytics, advanced production planning based on the most intelligent manufacturing execution system on the market (MES+) and information storage in a Cloud environment. Operations that are properly orchestrated to better manage possible fault or incidents in the system, automatically remedy stock issues or rebalance workloads. In short, the real-time programming of a new musical score in order to meet new demands and even anticipate new orders. This intelligent planning is possible thanks to the connectivity of material requirements systems (MRP) and business resources (ERP), which cross reference historical and real data to optimize manufacturing.
The cloud enables this choreography to be extended to different plants of the same company in different locations. Web services, through software, allow machine tools to cooperate with each other autonomously, in a coordinated manner, with hardly any human intervention and in line with the organization’s processes and priorities. These advanced solutions provide a qualitative and quantitative leap in productivity, efficiency and ultimately the competitiveness of the company; in which the knowledge of the business would not be possible without this orchestration of resources.
In summary, the orchestration of production consists of:
Designing processes in which people, software and machine tools participate
Configuring software and hardware in each of the systems involved
Connecting and automating the whole set of workflows
In this way, we have gone from organizing and automating machines for a particular use, to doing so in a combined way, according to the material type and cutting process, and finally to working in the cloud and organizing processes that are not in the same physical location, to the extent that the plant is now a Smart Factory.
This orchestration is also necessary because the maximum production efficiency of a plant no longer comes from systems provided by a single supplier. Rather, increasing specialization and collaboration demands that the solutions provided by different manufacturers be interrelated in order to get the most out of them. Thanks to the universality of our software, this communication between machines is feasible.
In short, orchestration is finding a way to adapt the musical score to the needs of each instrument, which we are able to get the most out of thanks to the data which guides each and every one of the processes and elements involved (people, machines and software). Finally, by applying the same choreography to all of them we can ensure everything flows with no error or bottlenecks.
An increase in the competitive pressure of the digital environment is forcing us to look for more time and cost effective means and greater productivity, requiring greater efforts in R&D to find innovative solutions in the metal and sheet metal industry. And in this search for better performance, two traditionally antagonistic technologies have joined forces to bring an optimized cutting solution to the market. We are talking about combining a water jet cutting machine (based on mechanical cutting through abrasion) and plasma cutting (thermal cutting using high temperatures that melt or vaporize the material).
In addition to the advantages of its products for the general market, Lantek nesting solutions offer added benefits like auto nesting, nesting of remnants via kits, with significant time and material savings.
Nowadays, the customization of products and services is the priority for any manufacturer in the metal sector. As a technological company, making software that is 100 percent adapted to the sheet metal market available to companies is a key goal for Lantek.