The Manufacturing Management System: a case study in the Aerospace Industry

Digitization and interconnection are two key features of the world we live in. Companies need to embrace this concepts, in order to survive in red oceans, so-called business segments with a very high level of competition. Lots of software products are available and can be used to push digitization in several fields, but an interconnected infrastructure to manage information is not implemented in many companies right now. Integration of Product Lifecycle Management, Manufacturing Execution System and Enterprise Resource Planning allows to generate a knowledge management system for the whole company, increasing procedure standardization and data consistency across different offices. Analyzing the solution planned in an aerospace company, it can be evaluated the impact of such a system in an industry based on discrete production for international projects lasting several months. To get through problems and difficulties encountered in the system implementation it has been used a trial and error methodology. The dissertation starts from a brief explanation on the state of the art of Manufacturing Execution System, before moving to the current situation section and then, through a step by step description of the required operations, ends with the integration of the Manufacturing Execution System inside the corporate landscape. Lastly, in order to grasp the disruptive potential of this system, it has been carried out a cost analysis based on rework time simulations for different mechanical operations. This analysis contains lots of assumptions, but anyway the estimated final cost outlines the importance of having a system to record operations times.