The importance of proper plant orchestration to be more competitive

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.