Unit 4

Assembly line and Manufacturing Execution system

Introduction to facility design

Facilities make a difference. They can provide a competitive edge by enabling and leveraging
the latest process concepts. For example Green buildings can save energy costs and increase
worker productivity. Facilities affect how efficiently workers can do their jobs, how much
and how fast goods can be produced, how difficult it is to automate a system, and how
responsive the system can be to changes in product or service design, product mix, or demand
volume. Facilities must be planned, located, and laid out.

Facility layout refers to the arrangement of activities, processes, departments, workstations,

storage areas, aisles, and common areas within an existing or proposed facility. The basic
objective of the layout decision is to ensure a smooth flow of work, material, people, and
information through the system.

Basic layouts

Layouts can take many different forms.

Process layouts

Process layouts, also known as functional layouts, group similar activities together in
departments or work centers according to the process or function they perform. For example,
in a machine shop, all drills would be located in one work center, lathes in another work
center, and milling machines in still another work center. A process layout is characteristic of
intermittent operations, service shops, job shops, or batch production, which serve different
customers with different needs. The volume of each customer’s order is low, and the
sequence of operations required to complete a customer’s order can vary considerably.

Figure. A Process Layout in Manufacturing

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Product layouts

Product layouts, better known as assembly lines, arrange activities in a line according to the
sequence of operations that need to be performed to assemble a particular product. Each
product has its own “line” specifically designed to meet its requirements. The flow of work is
orderly and efficient, moving from one workstation to another down the assembly line until a
finished product comes off the end of the line.

The advantage of the product layout is its efficiency and ease of use. The disadvantage is its
inflexibility. Significant changes in product design may require that a new assembly line be
built and new equipment be purchased.

Figure. A Product Layout

Fixed-position layouts

Fixed-position layouts are typical of projects in which the product produced is too fragile,
bulky, or heavy to move. Ships, houses, and aircraft are examples. In this layout, the product
remains stationary for the entire manufacturing cycle. Equipment, workers, materials, and
other resources are brought to the production site.

DESIGNING PRODUCT LAYOUTS

A product layout arranges machines or workers in a line according to the operations that need
to be performed to assemble a particular product. Product layouts or assembly lines are used
for high-volume production. To attain the required output rate as efficiently as possible, jobs
are broken down into their smallest indivisible portions, called work elements. A workstation
is any area along the assembly line that requires at least one worker or one machine. If each
workstation on the assembly line takes the same amount of time to perform the work
elements that have been assigned, then products will move successively from workstation to
workstation with no need for a product to wait or a worker to be idle. The process of
equalizing the amount of work at each workstation is called line balancing.
Line balancing
Assembly-line balancing operates under two constraints: precedence requirements and cycle
time restrictions.

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Precedence requirements are physical restrictions on the order in which operations are
performed on the assembly line. For example, we would not ask a worker to package a
product before all the components were attached, even if he or she had the time to do so
before passing the product to the next worker on the line. To facilitate line balancing,
precedence requirements are often expressed in the form of a precedence diagram.

Cycle time, the other restriction on line balancing, refers to the maximum amount of time the
product is allowed to spend at each workstation if the targeted production rate is to be
reached.

Desired cycle time is calculated by dividing the time available for production by the number
of units scheduled to be produced:

Suppose a company wanted to produce 120 units in an 8-hour day. The cycle time necessary
to achieve the production quota is

The actual cycle time, Ca, is the maximum workstation time on the line. It differs from the
desired cycle time when the production quota does not match the maximum output attainable
by the system.

Closely related to the concept of cycle time is takt time. It is the pace at which production
should take place to match customer demand.

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MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEM

Emergence of the MES concept

 The origins of the MES concept are to be found in the data collection systems of the
early 1980s. With the rise of the CIM concept (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) a
start was made on reproducing the interdependencies of various task areas in the IT
systems as well.
 In recent decades, industrial companies have invested much time and money in
machine and production line automation on one hand, and in ERP systems on the
other hand. Between these two automation layers lies another, usually called the MES
layer.
 MES concerns the activities that take place within a manufacturing department. These
include preparatory activities, such as detailed production scheduling and recipe
management, but also retrospective activities, such as data collection, reporting, and
analysis.
 In many factories, the situation can be called primitive in regard to these activities.
They use MS Excel for their detailed scheduling and reports, and MS Word to
manage operator instructions and recipes. When there are advanced applications
available, these come from various vendors and are not integrated.

Typical example of the current level of automation in many factories

This outdated situation leads to many problems. For example, on the management and
supervisory level, one has no insight into the current production situation. If the production
manager wants to determine the source of a problem, he or she must first walk over to local
systems in order to pull up the data files, then import these into a spreadsheet, and then
reconcile the data with each other; only then—perhaps—will the answer to the question be

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revealed. This process can sometimes consume more than two entire workdays. It’s
impossible for the operator, supervisor, or plant manager to work proactively.

Some twenty years ago, pioneers began creating custom software for operators, supervisors,
schedulers, plant managers, engineers, maintenance mechanics, and other factory personnel
to provide functionality missing from ERP systems and process control systems. Slowly but
surely, more and more software vendors discovered this hole in the market. They began
developing standard solutions, to which they’ve kept adding more and more functionality
over the years. In the early nineties, the term manufacturing execution system was coined for
this type of solution.

A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is an information system that drives effective

execution of manufacturing operations. Using current and accurate data an MES triggers,
guides, verifies, and reports on plant activities in real time—from order release, to
manufacturing, to delivery, to the finished goods inventory.

MESA and ISA

The organizations MESA and ISA lead the way in providing valuable information about
manufacturing execution systems, such as white papers, technical reports, standards, and
models and terminology.

MES According to MESA

MESA International stands for Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association

International. It’s a nonprofit organization. MESA was founded in 1991 to exchange
knowledge, experience, and best practices for using MES among vendors, system integrators,
analysts, and manufacturing company personnel.

The term MES arose in 1991. Multiple people claim they invented it. At that time, it stood for
manufacturing execution systems. Today, it means manufacturing enterprise solutions. After
all, MES is more than just a system for production control. Issues such as quality, inventory,
maintenance, product data management, and product life cycle management can’t be viewed
as separate from the MES domain. ... That’s why we changed the term in 2004.

The original concept manufacturing execution system concerns information systems that
support the things a production department must do in order to

 prepare and manage work instructions;

 monitor correct execution of the production process;
 gather and analyze information about the production process and the product, and
feed this back to other departments, such as accounting and logistics;
 solve problems and optimize procedures.

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MES According to ISA

ISA stands for International Society of Automation. This non-profit organization defines
standardization in the field of industrial automation as one of its primary objectives, in
addition to certification, education and training, publications, conferences, and shows.

ISA-95 functional hierarchy model

ISA-95 bears the title Enterprise-Control System Integration. ISA-95 is not an automation
system, but rather a method, a way of working, thinking, and communicating. All the models
are focused on specific aspects of ERP-MES integration; they each throw light onto the issue
from a different perspective.

The ideal MES

The “working area” of an MES will, of course, extend from interfacing with corporate
management applications as far as the deepest depths of data acquisition, communication
with industrial systems and the provision of data for machine controllers or influencing the
machine controllers directly. This extensive operational area, which not only includes a
comprehensive range of different topics but which must also cover different time levels,
ranging from days and weeks down to seconds, also calls for a tiered examination of the
individual functionalities. This examination can thus be subdivided into the following areas:

 The functionalities of an MES itself

 Communication with corporate management applications
 Communication with the manufacturing environment

In an analogous manner to these function groups in the ERP system, an MES can also be
divided into three function groups. These are primarily the functionalities for production, the
functionalities for quality and the functionalities for personnel allocation.

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 MES function groups

Function group: production

The function group “production” can include the following modules:

 PDA: production data acquisition

 MDC: machine data collection
 Tool and resource management and transmission of machine Settings
 MPL: material and production logistics

Function group: quality

The function group “quality” can include the following modules:

 SPC: statistical process control

 NCM: non-conformance management
 Incoming goods
 PDP: Process data processing module

Function group: human resources

 Staff work time logging

 Incentive wages
 Short-term manpower planning
 Access control

Dr. G.K. Badhotiya