Hi-Tech and Industrial Manufacturing

Manufacturers are under competitive pressure to fulfill the market demand of delivering quality products in shorter time frames while ensuring compliance with various regulatory bodies. This impacts every aspect of the company, especially manufacturing. In order to maintain the necessary margins and continuously growing quality benchmarks, their supply chain needs be agile and flexible -  one that can quickly respond to changing business requirements.

Hence the collaboration between their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning system) and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) is key, as they own the manufacturing workflows and production plans where decisions directly affect profitability. By integrating plant level operations with various enterprise processes and adopting a lean manufacturing model, companies will be able to reduce lead times, work-in-process inventory and overall costs of manufacturing.

But as manufacturing processes become complex due to multiple product variations, multi-step process flows and varying production conditions, current MES systems are only useful in coordinating and synchronizing production activities at the batch level. To manage the growing complexity, factories must become “Intelligent”. They need to collect information at the item level at each step of the process so that shop floor personnel can leverage it for improving efficiency. They need to perform process level validations in real time at the point of failure to reduce scrap and work-in-process inventory.

The traditional MES system does not have the ability to collect product genealogy information at the item level, perform validations, track defects at the point of failure or automatically route products for rework. They essentially are not geared to provide operational business intelligence in real time.

KeyTone’s Manufacturing solution has taken a unique approach to addressing the limitations of existing MES systems through a Work-In-Process solution leveraging the fundamental value of RFID technology.

KeyTone’s solution transforms current batch manufacturing to “intelligent” manufacturing by providing:

•  Granular Traceability
            SmartWIP records the changes made in every component of the product during the manufacturing process to be able to manage potential recalls and regulatory compliance 
•  Improved Quality
            SmartWIP identifies defects at the point of deviance and be able to rework the product to increase first pass yield
•  Lean Inventory
            SmartWIP maintains WIP inventory at levels that prevent process starvation and achieve JIT manufacturing
•  Improved Equipment Utilization
            SmartWIP provides visibility into the entire manufacturing operation to determine the current output and identifying areas of improvement to increase overall yield

KeyTone’s manufacturing analytics solution allows companies to improve overall profitability and effectiveness in manufacturing operations  by combining RFID information with planning and execution systems to provide operational business intelligence. Companies will be able to achieve overall operational efficiency (KPI) in manufacturing by empowering its users with real time production information to take decisions on the factory floor.