Page 280 - Sensors and Control Systems in Manufacturing

The Role of Sensors and Contr ol Technology in CIM
5.3.3.2 Material Planning and Resource Planning 239
Material planning and resource planning are two areas that require
timely and accurate information—demand schedules, production
commitment, inventory and work-in-progress status, scrap, actual
versus planning receipts, shortages, and equipment breakdowns—in
order to keep planning up to date with product demands.
Product and process definition data come from the engineering
areas. Output is to plant operation and procurement and includes
production schedules, order releases, and plans for manufactured
and purchased items.
5.3.3.3 Procurement
Procurement involves selecting suppliers and handling purchase
requirements and purchase orders for parts and materials. Among
the input, is material requirements from material planning and just-
in-time delivery requests from plant operations. Other input includes
shipping notices, invoices, and freight bills.
Output to suppliers includes contracts, schedules, drawings, pur-
chase orders, acknowledgments, requests for quotations, release of ven-
dor payments, and part and process specifications. In order to streamline
this output, as well as support just-in-time concepts, many enterprises
rely on sensors for electronic data interchange with vendors.
5.3.3.4 Plant Release
The functions of this area can vary, depending on the type of manu-
facturing environment. In continuous-flow environments, for exam-
ple, this area produces schedules, recipes to optimize use of capacity,
specifications, and process routings.
For job-shop fabrication and assembly environments, this area
prefers electronic or paperless-shop documents consisting of engi-
neering change levels; part, assembly, setup, and test drawings and
specifications; manufacturing routings; order and project control
numbers; and bar codes, tags, or order-identification documents.
However, large-volume industries are evolving from typical job-
shop operations to continuous-flow operations, even for fabrication
and assembly-type processes.
Input—typically an exploded production plan detailing required
manufacturing items—comes from material planning. Output—
schedules, recipes, or shop packets—is used in plant operations for
scheduling.

5.3.4 Plant Operations
Plant operations can be described in terms of nine functions (Fig. 5.5).

5.3.4.1 Production Management
The production management area provides dynamic scheduling
functions for the plant floor by assigning priorities, personnel, and