Datasweep announces Advantage 3.0
With Advantage 3.0, customers gain a real-time view across the extended manufacturing supply chain and can use this real-time business intelligence to improve available-to-promise dates, Supply Chain Planning forecasts and plant level MRP production schedules.
Advantage 3.0 delivers new Web-based Production Scheduler and Line Manager modules and provides manufacturers with vital real-time touch-points to ERP and Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems to significantly enhance overall Web-based supply chain agility and effectiveness.
According to Kevin Chao, VP of engineering at Datasweep, with Datasweep Advantage 3.0, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are presented with an application suite to connect their line level plant floor operations with their plant and enterprise level planning systems. "This kind of visibility gives the manufacturer the time to react quickly to any disruptions during production so that they can meet customer delivery expectations," he says.
"Datasweep's new Production Scheduler and Line Manager modules working with the rest of our capabilities and unique integrated data mart allow manufacturers to proactively use real-time production trends to deliver meaningful available-to-promise dates to their customers and to create achievable and efficient supply chain forecasts and production plans," Chao adds.
Market analysts, like Julie Fraser, Principal and Director, Industry Directions, agree. "With Advantage 3.0, Datasweep is helping their customers to link real-time manufacturing floor events to supply chain planning and ERP systems for improved overall supply chain agility," she says. "As high-technology manufacturers build and sell more customized products, integrating real-time order status becomes critical to online visibility and demand-driven responsiveness."
Datasweep Advantage enables complex product manufacturers to leverage the Web for online visibility into order status and critical production information including yield, statistical process control (SPC), work in process (WIP), cycle time, practical capacity, changeover management, and line availability.
Unlike existing client server ERP or manufacturing management systems that can take years to implement initially and then can take weeks and months to upgrade to the latest revision, Datasweep Advantage 3.0 can be implemented in less than twelve weeks and upgraded in just a matter of hours.
"Datasweep's Web-centric architecture allows for a seamless upgrade. What could have taken weeks or months took us only a matter of hours, allowing Everdream to continue benefiting from the new capabilities delivered by Advantage 3.0," says Ray Alstadt, VP of manufacturing for Everdream Corp., a leading provider of outsourced IT solutions. "Everdream has been using Advantage 2.0 and already has seen significant results in terms of greater supply chain responsiveness and time savings. We were pleased to see that upgrading to Advantage 3.0 did not disrupt our business operations which is a crucial business benefit."
How it works
Advantage 3.0 now include Production Scheduler and Line Manager, both new modules that will allow for better production line management and integration with ERP and APS systems.
The Production Scheduler, which provides an electronic "white board" for line level manufacturing scheduling, eliminating the need for a manager or planner to manually connect the production plan to the manufacturing line. Production Scheduler takes the ERP/APS/MRP schedule that is currently broken down manually using spreadsheets and/or white boards to deliver a meaningful production schedule to the individual line based on operator and machine availability, current yield, changeover time, and component supplies. This feature schedules individual manufacturing Work Orders and associated resources and provides comparison of actual to plan within the Datasweep Advantage product suite.
Other unique components include:
- Graphical view of the plant floor schedule.
- Real-time view of equipment loading to determine if there is capacity for "hot" jobs.
- Automatic highlighting of schedule conflicts to let Supply Chain operators know if moving a job impacts others.
- Privileged user features - allows supervisors to make sequencing or task changes and modify equipment resources to accommodate a last minute job.
- Provides a filtered view of the planned schedule from ERP or APS systems. Filters and sorting can be done based on work order and equipment parameters.
The Line Manager module of Advantage 3.0 provides detailed line and equipment tracking and management along with usage tracking, capacity information, line and equipment states and status, downtime tracking, line and equipment changeover management, and integration with machine level control systems (MMI, SCADA, PLC, CNC). The module also provides critical real-time feedback about line and machine availability to plant and supply chain scheduling applications to improve the production planning process.
- Automatically captures line, work center and equipment usage/utilization for both WIP and historical, by product/revision (unit and lot).
- Indicates line, work center and equipment capacity both target and actual.
- Flexible tool to manually re-balance a line and perform what-if scheduling and resource allocation.
- Perform/Manage/Improve "Line-Set" and "Changeover" operations, dynamically selecting work centers and equipment to use.
Edited by Jim Lardear
Managing Editor, PlantAutomation.com
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