Page 283 - Sensors and Control Systems in Manufacturing

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5.3.4.6 Material Transfer
Material transfer involves the movement of materials, tools, parts,
and products among the functional areas of the plant. These activities
may be manual. Or they may be semiautomated, using control panels,
forklifts, trucks, and conveyers. Or they may be fully automated,
relying on programmable logical controllers, distribution control sys-
tems, stacker cranes, programmed conveyers, automated guided
vehicles, and pipelines.
Input in this area may be manual requests or those generated by
the system. Output includes reporting completed moves to produc-
tion management.

5.3.4.7 Product Shipping
The product shipping area supports the movement of products to
customers, distributors, warehouses, and other plants. Among the
activities are selecting shipment and routing needs, consolidating
products for a customer or carrier order, preparing shipping lists and
bills of lading, reporting shipments, and returning goods to vendors.
The primary input is from customer order servicing, and it
includes the type of product and the method and date of shipment.
Output includes reporting shipment dates to customer order servic-
ing, billing, and accounts receivable.

5.3.4.8 Plant Maintenance
Plant maintenance includes those functions that ensure the availabil-
ity of production equipment and facilities. Maintenance categories
include routine, emergency, preventive, and inspection services. In
addition, many of today’s advanced users of systems are moving
toward diagnostic tools based on expert systems, which reduce
equipment downtime. Input (maintenance requests) can be initiated
by plant personnel, a preventive maintenance and inspection system,
or a process and equipment monitoring system. Output includes
requests for purchase of maintenance items, schedules for mainte-
nance for use in production management, requests for equipment
from facilities engineering, and maintenance work order costs to cost
accounting.

5.3.4.9 Plant Site Services
The final area of plant operation is plant site services. Input received
and output provided cover such functions as energy supply and util-
ities management, security, environmental control, grounds mainte-
nance, and computer and communications installations.

5.3.5 Physical Distribution
Physical distribution can be viewed as having two functional areas
(Fig. 5.6).