SCHULZ, Thomas: Flexible and modular software framework as a solution for operational excellence in manufacturing. In: Proceedings of Factory Automation 2012, Veszprém : University of Pannonia, pp. 8-11, 2012

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Flexible and modular software framework as a solution for operational excellence in manufacturing

THOMAS SCHULZ

GE Intelligent Platforms Europe S.A., Landwehrstr. 54, 64293 Darmstadt, GERMANY t.schulz@ge.com

Abstract: Continuous improvements in key areas of manufacturing operations can help reduce manufacturing costs, protect profit margins, and increase yield while maintaining product quality. With a phased approach to Operational Excellence, it is able to apply a continuous improvement regimen, delivering value-added results. Open and layered Software Solutions deliver information that enables the optimization of manufacturing activities from order launch to finished goods and allows manufacturers to react effectively to changes in demand, to compete at a high level, and to enhance profitability. The ability to adapt to flexible requirements and frequent changes has emerged as a new paradigm for successful implementation of Operational Excellence Solutions. Hereby common information systems are mostly not able to fulfill the requirement of adaptability for manufacturing changes. The purpose of using open and layered frameworks is to establish incremental and iterative development of reusable software components and models based on an industry standard architecture for complex manufacturing systems. Keywords: Operational Excellence, Manufacturing Executions Systems, Software Framework

1 Introduction Today’s manufacturers operate in an increasingly demanding environment that includes global competition, increasing pressures for cost reductions and new products, quality-driven compliance, and improvements in on-time. Rapid technological advancements provide operations managers with tremendous opportunities for improvement. Pressure of intense competition requires organizations to seek out new tools for handling their current processes and also gaining access to new markets. The growing complexity of information technology landscapes in manufacturing is a challenge for many companies. A large number of standard software packages - mostly extended and modified – individual software solutions, legacy applications, and different infrastructure components lead to high cost and limited ability to respond quickly to new business requirements. The paper is organized as follows. The next section describes operational excellence in manufacturing, the challenges that manufacturing operations and manufacturing software systems are facing nowadays. Section 3 introduces a software framework for modular and flexible applications bases on a service-oriented architecture. The illustration of the flexible and modular solution path is given in the end of this

section. The finally conclusion in Section 4 concludes this paper.

2 Operational excellence Solutions for operational excellence in manufacturing require a large amount of data. Small changes in the manufacturing environment can produce many different changes to the data input for the framework model. As a manufacturing system progresses from a concept to a detailed design to an installed and operating facility, the data model of the software framework must change. Typical small changes include equipment selection and location, control rules and operating procedures for equipment and material handling systems, arriving material and customer order characteristics, and operating hours. Some examples of changes that have a broader impact are new products that are being made, complete new production processes or even changes to the plant layout. The speed of these will increase in the future and will have continuous impact on the commercial success of companies in several manufacturing areas [1]. 2.1 Manufacturing operations The ability to adapt to frequent changes has emerged as a new paradigm for successful business operations. Hereby common information

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systems are mostly not able to fulfill the requirement of adaptability for business or organizational changes. However, the ability to adapt to changes is crucial for business organizations and the support of business processes by information systems plays a crucial part. According to [2], the challenges that manufacturing organizations are facing nowadays present are wide ranging and include: intense competition, global markets, global financing, global strategy, enhanced product variety, mass customization, service businesses, quality improvement, flexibility, advances in technology, employee involvement, environment and ethical issues. Several articles on manufacturing flexibility like [3] and [4] describes several types of flexibility such as machine, labor, material handling, routing, operation, expansion, volume, mix, new product, market, and modification. In this paper, we define manufacturing flexibility as the ability of manufacturing to adapt its capabilities to produce quality products in a time and cost effective manner in response to changing product characteristics, material supply, and demand, or to employ technological process enhancements. 2.1 Manufacturing software systems Manufacturing shop floor information and control flow management is still a challenging task due to the heterogeneity of data structures and information systems. The objective of vertical integration from the enterprise application (ERP) to the production control level (DCS, PLC) is still unrivalled. The exchange of data between these two levels is done either manually or semi automatically. Most of the existing solutions are missing needed flexibility and scalability. In the context of manufacturing systems, there are many publications of literature that deals with defining and measuring the flexibility of these systems. Buzacott states in [5] that the definitions of flexibility, action flexibility, and state flexibility apply well to the manufacturing systems environment. Setchi and Lagos explain in [6] that manufacturing systems of the next generation must provide increased levels of flexibility, reconfigurability and intelligence to allow them to respond to the highly dynamic market demands. For practical purposes it seems advisable to concentrate on three objectives of flexibility as defined by Chryssolouris in [7]:

• Product flexibility enables a manufacturing system to make a variety of part types with the same equipment.

• Operation flexibility refers to the ability to produce a set of products using different machines, materials, operations, and sequence of operations.

• Capacity flexibility allows a manufacturing system to vary the production volumes of different products to accommodate changes in demand, while remaining profitable.

3 Software framework A framework is the realization mode of the configurability of information system. It includes an integrated collection of components that collaborate to produce a reusable architecture for a family of related applications (see also [8] and [9]. Implementing software frameworks used for operational excellence in manufacturing is still a challenging task due to the heterogeneity of data structures and information systems. Traditional techniques approach software design and implementation as if a system will remain static and have a long and stable life. The problem stems in our case from dynamics. The cornerstone of operational excellence journey is tightly integrated Framework of Proficy software solutions, which enable the critical capabilities needed to meet improvement goals. In this section we introduce the core concepts needed to implement our approach of modular and flexible application systems. 3.1 Service-oriented architecture Software architecture is the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution architectural description is a collection of products to document an architecture [10]. A Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) is defined from Barry and Krafzig specific software architecture based on services as fundamental elements for integrating and developing applications [11, 12]. Key concepts of SoA are service components, services data and service bus embedded in the application frontend with the service repository. Services are specific software components and communicating with each other by sending and receiving messages. When acting as a service provider a service publishes its

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interfaces that can be invoked by other services that play the role of a service requestor. SoA provides an opportunity to achieve broad-scale interoperability while offering modularity and flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. A SoA is characterized by the loosely coupling of the services involved. Using SoA in an accurate way Zaigham and Erl reporting the following benefits [13, 14]: • Seamless connectivity of applications • Location transparency and High scalability • Enhanced reuse of modules and applications • Parallel and independent development • Flexible at maintenance and requirement

changes • Reduced cost of development

3.2 Flexible and modular solutions The Proficy software framework from GE Intelligent Platforms has helped many companies develop a solid understanding of potential Operational Excellence improvements that exist within their operations today, and where additional value can be found in the future [15, 16, 17].

Fig.1: Cost-effective project development Figure 1 shows the main components of cost-effective project development. Key issues are: • Reduced implementation costs and time • Minimize downtime for deployment of new

or modified services • Faster time to solution • Flexible service deployment options • Minimized modification time after change of

technical requirements The Operational Excellence journey from GE Intelligent Platforms offers a continual process for capturing data, analyzing information, making process changes, and validating the improvements to meet expectations. It includes five key steps:

• Process Visibility gain visibility into your process by automating real-time data collection for visualization and delivering the level of insight required for intelligent decision making.

• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) regimen helps you shift the focus from runtime efficiency to throughput efficiency. By contextualizing data from several dimensions such as equipment availability, performance, and product quality, and performing trending and correlation analysis, you can gain deeper insight at all levels of the business, as well as critical process parameters.

• Process Reliability builds upon the OEE regimen and focuses on manual processes and scheduling with the greatest impact on consistency and repeatability. It also enables demand-driven supply chain agility.

• Partial Operational Excellence involves understanding and controlling the impact that different suppliers of raw materials have on process quality and yield, the main drivers for local Operational Excellence. Being able to predict and react to changing materials and process dynamics ensures first-pass quality every time, and helps determine the ideal conditions from which to generate maximum yield.

• Enterprise Operational Excellence is the final step across the enterprise with seamless integration from the plant floor to the ERP system, including Warehouse Management, Production Planning and Maintenance. It is critical to drive supply chain excellence by coordinating the real-time status of orders, inventory changes, and overall process performance.

A popular method for driving rapid operational improvement is to measure overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). The OEE measure attempts to reveal these hidden costs [18] and when the measure is applied by autonomous small groups on the shop-floor together with quality control tools it is an important complement to the traditional top-down oriented performance measurement systems. These projects rely on obtaining information about availability of equipment, throughput of the equipment and the quality of what is actually produced. There are a variety of ways to perform these calculations but the most efficient and reliable way of performing the calculations is to base them on automatically collected data as opposed to

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manually entered information, which is more prone to operator error. Automated systems and plant historians provide an excellent foundation for automatically collected data and a secure storage mechanism to ensure accuracy.

4 Conclusion Modularity and Flexibility are fundamental need for manufacturing companies seeking to react to a rapidly changing landscape that includes emerging competitive threats, shifting compliance and regulatory requirements, and evolving technology. Achieving flexibility and better alignment of business and IT objectives requires executing IT projects with a high level of coordination, accuracy, and clarity. Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) is an architectural paradigm for developing systems from autonomous yet interoperable components. Manufacturing process driven development of services-oriented solutions helps create solutions that truly meets operational excellence requirements today and are readily adapted when those needs change in the future. It is important to first establish a target architecture and direction so that projects can be planned as steps towards that eventual goal. References: [1] Kühnle, Hermann; Klostermeyer, Axel; Lorentz, Kai: A Paradigm Shift to Distributed Systems in Plant Automation. In: Proceedings of the International NAISO Congress on Information Science Innovations (ISI' 2001). Dubai, 2001, pp. 463-469. [2] Russell, Roberta S.; Taylor, Bernard W. III: Operations Management: Creating Value Along the Supply Chain. Cambridge University Press, 2008. [3] Sethi, Ajay K.; Sethi, Suresh P.: Flexibility in Manufacturing: A Survey. The International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1990, pp. 289-328. [4] Gupta, Yash P.; Somers, Toni M.: 1992. The measurement of manufacturing flexibility. European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 60, No. 2, 1992, pp. 166-182. [5] Buzacott, John A.: The Fundamental Principles of Flexibility in Manufacturing Systems. In: Proceedings of the First International Congress on Flexible Manufacturing Systems. Amsterdam, 1982, pp. 23-30. [6] Setchi, Rossi M.; Lagos, Nikolaos: Reconfigurability and Reconfigurable

Manufacturing Systems: State-Of-The-Art Review. In: Industrial Informatics, Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN '04). Berlin, 2004, pp. 529-535. [7] Chryssolouris, George: Manufacturing Systems: Theory and Practice. Springer-Verlag, 2005. [8] Johnson, Ralph; Foote, Brain: Designing Reusable Classes. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1988, pp. 22-35. [9] Yu, Dongjin; Ruan, Hongyong: General framework of profession software supporting rapid development. Computer Engineering, Vol.35, No.20, 2009, pp. 47-49. [10] ISO/IEC 42010:2007: Systems and software engineering - Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems. International Organization for Standardization, 2007. [11] Barry, Douglas K.: Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture: The Savvy Manager's Guide. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2003. [12] Krafzig, Dirk; Banke, Karl; Slama; Dirk: Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices. Prentice Hall International, 2005 [13] Zaigham, Mahmood: Service oriented architecture: Potential benefits and challenges. In: Computer Science and Technology, Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS International Conference on Computers. Agios Nikolaos, 2007, pp. 496-500. [14] Erl, Thomas: Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2005. [15] Hilger, Marcel; Schulz, Thomas: Energie, Dampf und Pressluft unter der Lupe - Gezielte Verbrauscherfassung. IT & Production, Vol. 12, No. 10, 2011, pp. 52-53. [16] Bloss, Richard: When your assembly system controller can be more than just a controller. Assembly Automation, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2007, pp. 297-301. [17] Robinson, Sean: Optimierung der Betriebsprozesse. Packaging journal, Vol. 10, No. 6, 2011, p. 46. [18] Nakajima, Seiichi: Introduction to TPM: Total Productive Maintenance. Productivity Press, 1988.