Integration of MES and PLM systems for manufacturing knowledge management in OKP companies

Companies operating under the One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP) paradigm, in response to the rising global competitive pressure, design and produce products aimed at satisfying single customer’s demand. The product variance and uncertainty, characteristics inherent to this production model, pose multiple challenges both in Product Development and Production Planning and Management. Firms need to be flexible, responsive to changes in demand and industry structure, fast in product development, and able to manage multiple concurrent design processes. Knowledge has a central role in this context. It is the main production asset, allowing firms to anticipate design and production problems, thus decreasing simultaneously the need for rework and the lead time. Therefore, the implementation of formal knowledge management practices and systems is crucial for the achievement of a sustainable competitive advantage. This thesis addresses the problem of using an integrated Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system to automate the production planning and to collect, manage and distribute product and process knowledge. The case study under analysis concerns an Italian OKP firm operating in the automotive sector as a supplier of prototypes and small series for European car manufacturers. The MES software provided by the Octavic company was customized to handle the difficulty in estimating the processing times, due to the great variability of machining times, processes, and job allocation typical of an OKP company. To this aim, a comprehensive classification of the products and operations in the work cycle was proposed. The classes were used to compute the processing times and to find the most suitable job sequence to minimize production delays by means of operational search algorithms. A workflow to collect the data needed by the MES system was also defined in the Aras PLM. For this purpose, the database already present within the application has been extended to contain the data required by the MES software. Finally, after assigning roles and responsibilities according to the process, a notification system was created to allow the manager to monitor the progress of the process in real time. The deployment of the integrated system demonstrated the effectiveness of using PLM and MES for production and knowledge management in a turbulent environment. It was estimated that the use of the MES can significantly reduce the time needed for production planning, thus contributing to the company's flexibility and responsiveness. The PLM system, on the other hand, has the effect of both improving the quality of the data and formalizing the data acquisition process, thus ensuring total control over the lifecycle of the information required for production.