Manufacturing Process Management (MPM)
6/17/2004
Few companies today design their products or plan their manufacturing schedule on paper anymore. However, most do engineer the "how" of making the product on paper, and if they use computers at all, rely on MS Excel spreadsheets, with no integration to other systems. Computerized MPM systems can provide the engineering bill of materials (eBOM) electronically from product engineering to industrial and manufacturing engineers who can design and document the manufacturing processes at high levels of detail, while mapping these processes to manufactured and consumed components. These MPM systems can then determine the time and resource requirements for both equipment and people at the production locations including plants, workstations, and machines, and then generate the shop floor work instructions. Important attributes of production sequence and precedence are documented, manufactured activity-based costs are calculated, value added work content is determined, and the manufacturing process is reconciled with the product, complete with model-mix and option content variations. This manufacturing bill of material or mBOM, also referred to as the bill of process or BOP, can now be electronically sent to the production planning systems (MRP/ERP/MES) where the plant's production can be planned accurately, in detail, from the first day of new product launch.
Keywords: Manufacturing Process Management (MPM), BOM (Bill of Material), BOP (Bill of Process), PLM, PDM, MES, MRP, ERP, Mixed Model Line Balancing, Time Estimation, Work Instructions, Manufactured Activity Based Costing (ABC) Quality FMEAs/Control Plans