A cut above the competition [corporate profile]

Being a market leader is more than just about developing excellent products. A manufacturer also needs to focus on the complete package of quality, after-sales service and reliability. Hayter, a lawnmower manufacturing company, has successfully differentiated their brand in a surprisingly competitive market and even brought business back to the UK from European and Asian manufacturers by using exceptional quality, after-sales service and reliability as the key building blocks. Although brand differentiation and market segmentation was the focus of the company, Hayter still needs to focus on costs. This paper discusses how Hayter was able to survive a market dominated by low cost mowers.     

An Integrated Maintenance Management System for an Advanced Manufacturing Company

Maintenance costs in advanced manufacturing companies, e.g. electronics manufacturing companies, have been steadily increasing as the companies upgrade their production facilities. Maintenance costs are normally a considerable portion of the product cost. To maintain a competitive place in the market, it is critical for an advanced manufacturing company to have a sound maintenance management system, which can control its maintenance costs at the lowest level and maintain its overall equipment effectiveness at the highest level. This paper reports on an integrated maintenance management system, which has been developed and implemented in an advanced electronics manufacturing company in Hong Kong. The methods and principles of the system are discussed in sections on maintenance performance auditing, cost recording and tracing, reliability centred maintenance planning and control, condition monitoring and on-line feedback control, and integrated maintenance planning and control.     

Product Mix Optimization for Semiconductor Manufacturing Based on AHP and ANP Analysis

In a competitive market, a company needs to utilize its available capacity efficiently in order to acquire high profit. The purpose of this paper is to present effective approaches to find a set of product mix optimal for the company to achieve the optimal manufacturing. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and analytic network process (ANP) approaches are taken to analyse multiple process inputs and outputs, incorporating experts’ opinion on their priority of importance, to obtain optimal product mixes for semiconductor production. The results provide guidance to the fabricator regarding strategies for accepting orders to maximize the manufacturing efficiency and the profit, while simultaneously considering other important input and output factors for maintaining manufacturing smoothness.     

Thirty-criteria-based agility assessment: a case study in an Indian pump manufacturing organisation

The present market situation has become fragile, so in order to adopt and hence to sustain an organisation, it needs to evaluate itself, so as to identify its current strategic agile position. In today's trend agility exerted by manufacturing, organisation plays an important role. The present work has been conducted to assess the agility of the manufacturing organisation using a scoring approach. This paper presents a 30-criteria agility assessment model which could be utilised to measure agility and to identify the agile characteristics of organisation. Thus, weak factors were identified, and proposals are suggested so as to enhance the agility of the organisation.     

Cost drivers-based method for machining and assembly cost estimations in mould manufacturing

Dies and moulds represent an essential element in manufacturing process and significantly influence the fabrication time and cost of the products. Moreover, the market continuously asks the die manufacturers for products that have better characteristics in terms of finishing, complexity or flexibility within a reduction of the time to market and cost, so as to follow the rapid changes in the product design. Therefore, in order to give to the customer the best cost-performance solution, companies require accurate and reliable tools for die manufacturing cost estimation both for commercial purposes and for comparisons amongst different design solutions. In this context, the paper proposes a method for manufacturing cost estimation based on the definition of cost drivers. The method was implemented using a database coming from a company specialized in the production of dies for sheet forming and rubber injection and it allowed to estimate a cost estimation relationship (CER) function that is able to correlate the cost drivers with the manufacturing cost of machining and assembly phases. In particular, the method allowed to overcome the limitations related to the available data as the company's own storage criterion, unbalancing and high and non-uniform scattering that do not allow use of the variance analysis technique.     

Lighting the way [medical diode manufacturing]

Medical diode manufacturer Diomed has experienced significant growth since launching its first product in 1993. The company has been helped along the way by Infor:swan, a provider of ERP systems for manufacturing SMEs, which has helped to resolve Diomed's materials handling and enterprise resource planning (ERP) issues and also played a significant role in enabling Diomed to attain the coveted US Food and Drug Authority approval, essential for the company to market its product in the USA     

Value stream mapping and benefit–cost analysis application for value visibility of a pilot project on RFID investment integrated to a manual production control system—a case study

The importance of responding to customer demand to stay competitive in the global market and to increase market share has been increasing for companies lately. Due to demand fluctuations and difficulties to estimate it, gradually it becomes more difficult to sustain profitability and to fulfill demand. The company’s main problem is how to cut costs while producing small numbers of many types of products. For that reason, cost-conscious companies have focused on monitoring and controlling manufacturing and supplier-related activities by means of manual/electronic control devices in order to enhance the efficiency in the supply chain management and logistics process. This paper presents a case study about deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology-based electronic Kanban system in an automotive industry supplier firm. In this project, by deploying RFID technology in a pilot area within the current manual Kanban system of this company, it has been possible to measure the true value added time in the production process. Value stream mapping is used to exhibit the mandatory requirements of RFID technology deployment in the shop floor. As a part of the study, we generate a current value stream map and a future value stream map, which contain the recommended revisions for the automotive supplier company. To evaluate the return of the investment, performance metrics were established and benefit–cost analysis is made. Obviously, future gains will include better inventory management to reduce the inventory levels within the production system.     

An agent-based infrastructure for virtual enterprises using Web-Services standards

Nowadays, most products in the market are increasing unlikely manufactured entirely within a single company. Instead, a network of manufacturing companies, usually known as a Virtual Enterprise, is involved. Each of the companies becomes a node in the network to play a role in the value-adding process in the production cycle. In other words, a Virtual Enterprise (VE) is an ad hoc organization that combines the competencies of its partners and commits its resources flexibly to respond to business opportunities. To facilitate effective collaboration, suitable information systems that can enable VE partners to communicate and share data, information and knowledge across organizational boundaries are essential. One of the major obstacles towards achieving this goal is a lack of standardized technologies to allow partnering enterprises to publicise their services and expertise as well as locating and interacting with one another in a dynamic fashion. This paper proposes a multi-agent infrastructure to manage VEs and support XML-based agents coordination using a contract net protocol and Web Services standards. Feasible agent-based architectures for partnering enterprises are also suggested and illustrated.     

面向航空企业制造单元的I_2DEF建模

提出了一种制造单元的概念,分析了航空企业制造单元的特点,并选用I_2DEF建模方法进行制造单元的建模。这将有利于建立企业全局的信息集成环境,从而提高企业的柔性和适应市场变化的能力。     

Integrated Manufacturing System for Precision Press Tooling

The press tooling industry, characterised by many small-scale job-shops, is facing an increasingly competitive global market. This comes at a time when there is a shortage of experienced process planners and unavailability of affordable CAD/CAM systems that could provide an integrated solution for manufacturing sheet metal tooling. Many commercially available CAD/CAM systems are either too expensive or too narrow in scope, in the sense that they provide only point solutions. The design of press tools and its manufacturing functions are highly specialised and knowledge-intensive in nature. This paper presents a framework and the implementation details of an integrated system that has been developed for a local sheet metal tooling company specialising in precision punches and dies. A PC-based system has been implemented on an AutoCAD platform using the Autolisp programming language.     

Manufacturing Resource Planning Technology Based on Genetic Programming Simulation

Network-based manufacturing is a kind of distributed system, which enables manufacturers to finish production tasks as well as to grasp the opportunities in the market, even if manufacturing resources are insufficient. One of the main problems in network-based manufacturing is the allocation of resources and the assignment of tasks rationally, according to flexible resource distribution. The mapping rules and relations between production techniques and resources are proposed, followed by the definition of the resource unit. Ultimately, the genetic programming method for the optimization of the manufacturing system is put forward. A set of software for the optimization system of simulation process using genetic programming techniques has been developed, and the problems of manufacturing resource planning in network-based manufacturing are solved with the simulation of optimizing methods by genetic programming. The optimum proposal of hardware planning, selection of company and scheduling will be obtained in theory to help company managers in scientific decision-making.     

Why 802.3/Ethernet LANs flourish in manufacturing operations

802.3/Ethernet has met the needs of many manufacturing companies because of its robust features. If it had not met the four basic requirements, then another IEEE LAN technology would have become the industrial choice. In the future, 802.3/Ethernet LANs will continue to be used. They are easy to expand with new segments without disruptions to manufacturing operations and provide much available bandwidth for more network traffic. Today's investment in 802.3/Ethernet LANs will last until the late 1990s for plant-floor computing needs due to their cost, EMI immunity, performance and area coverage.     

Measuring up

Comparing performance with other companies, both inside and outside the manufacturing arena, is becoming an important tool for company development. The Made in Britain project aims to meet the needs of those keen to benchmark their sites in terms of best practice and performance. Philip Hanson reports its findings.     

Investigating optimal capacity scalability scheduling in a reconfigurable manufacturing system

Responsiveness to dynamic market changes in a cost-effective manner is becoming a key success factor for any manufacturing system in today’s global economy. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) have been introduced to react quickly and effectively to such competitive market demands through modular and scalable design of the manufacturing system on the system level, as well as on the machine components’ level. This paper investigates how RMSs can manage their capacity scalability on the system level in a cost-effective manner. An approach for modeling capacity scalability is proposed, which, unlike earlier approaches, does not assume that the capacity scalability is simply a function of fixed increments of capacity units. Based on the model, a computer tool that utilizes a genetic algorithm optimization technique is developed. The tool aids the systems’ designers in deciding when to reconfigure the system in order to scale the capacity and by how much to scale it in order to meet the market demand in a cost-effective way. The results showed that, in terms of cost, the optimal capacity scalability schedules in an RMS are superior to both the exact demand capacity scalability approach and the approach of supplying all required capacity at the beginning of the planning period, which is adopted by flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The results also suggest that the cost-effective implementation of an RMS can be realized through decreasing the cost of reconfiguration of these new systems.     

Assessing sustainability benefits of cybermanufacturing systems

Confronted with growing sustainability awareness, mounting environmental pressure, manufacturers are seriously striving to address sustainability-related issues without sacrificing customers’ needs and market competitiveness. A new manufacturing system called cybermanufacturing system (CMS) has great potential in addressing sustainability issues by handling manufacturing tasks differently from and better than traditional manufacturing systems. CMS is a vision for future manufacturing where physical components are fully integrated and seamlessly networked with computational processes, forming an on-demand, intelligent, and communicative manufacturing resource and capability repository with optimal, sustainability-oriented manufacturing solutions. The recent developments in the Internet of things, cloud computing, fog computing, service-oriented technologies, etc., all contributed to the development of CMS. In this new manufacturing paradigm, every manufacturing resource or capability is digitalized, registered, and networked to each other directly or through the Internet, thus enabling intelligent behaviors of manufacturing components and systems such as self-awareness, self-prediction, self-optimization, and self-configuration, among others. In this research, a comprehensive definition of CMS has been developed, a suggested architecture of CMS has been constructed, and important functions of CMS have been identified. Simulation models have been developed and used to investigate the sustainability benefits of CMS. The simulation results show promising sustainability benefits of CMS over traditional manufacturing systems.     

Digital manufacturing - All or nothing - Using Dassault Systemes PLM, BOC Edwards has maintained its pre-eminent market position, improved design, increased engineering quality and made a positive impact on engineering and production as well as in the marketing department

BOC Edwards is a world leader in vacuum technology for industrial, scientific, processing and semiconductor applications. The company uses CATIA V5 and ENOVIA SmartTeam to design and build vacuum pumps capable of achieving high vacuums down to 10-10 mbar. At BOC Edwards, product development and operational and manufacturing processes are crucial to maintain its pre-eminent market position. Concurrent working with several engineering disciplines enable the company to develop pumps and the technologies that they incorporate at the highest possible standards     

Price-Based Negotiation for Task Assignment in a Distributed Network Manufacturing Mode Environment

Facing serious challenges and pressures from the demand for customisation as well as the growing trends in globalisation of the economy and market, manufacturing enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, have to transform their traditional manufacturing organisational mode to network-like, dynamic and reconfigurable groups by applying information technology. By using the concept of agile manufacturing, we propose a distributed network manufacturing mode (DNMM). In DNMM, dispersed organisation units are connected by a network, collaborating with others to finish the manufacturing orders promptly for meeting the needs of customers. Each organisational unit is more or less autonomous and has certain capabilities to solve problems independently. The well-known Contract Net Protocol has been widely used to handle temporal constraints and to deal with scheduling conflicts; however, owing to its relative simplicity in coping with complex problems, modifications to it are needed for satisfying various requirements for improving system performance. In this paper, we utilise a market-like mechanism based on price to assign tasks among organisational units in DNMM, propose a model for dynamic task assignment as well as describing the main roles and functions of the model, discuss in detail the price-based negotiation mechanisms, and finally present a simulation experiment implemented in our distributed network manufacturing prototype system.     

面向异地协同设计的虚拟制造专用网的研究与实现

提出了利用VPN（虚拟专用网）构建网上制造系统的理论框架,通过PDM（产品数据管理）对异地制造资源进行远程管理和控制,建立面向产品的VMN（虚拟制造专用网）,实现产品异地设计与制造的协同工作,从而达到有效地组织并利用资源,快速响应市场变化的目的：文中提出了VMN这一全新的概念及原理框架,并对其具体实施的可行性进行了分析。     

Measuring organisational agility before and after implementation of TADS

The ever increasing competition compels the modern organisations to react quickly in accordance with this kind of dynamic demands of the customers, which is referred to as agility, and currently researchers are addressing these capabilities under the field agile manufacturing. The success of achieving agility lies in designing agile-friendly products. In this direction, very little researches have been pursued. In order to fill this gap, a model called total agile design system (TADS) is proposed. The implementation study conducted to examine this model in a traditional manufacturing company is briefly appraised. A scoring model has been used for measuring agility before and after implementation of TADS. The implementation study revealed the improvement of agility by 10%. This improvement is appreciable in traditional manufacturing organisation where only the mass production-based practices are only currently practiced.     

一种面向网络化制造的车间层生产控制体系结构及实现技术

随着网络化制造的发展,车间层生产控制在企业制造中的作用日益增强。提出了一种基于CORBA、SOAP及A- gent技术的车间层生产控制体系结构,研究了企业内部生产控制尤其是远程联盟企业间协同生产控制的实现技术。运 用该体系结构和实现技术,企业提高了市场应变与制造能力,从而快速响应外部环境。