By Ricardo Llama and Prabu Natarajan
Having a Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) system, or at least a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is one of the best ways for manufacturing organizations to improve the productivity and efficiency of the plants.
Using a MOM system will allow the organization to commit to continuous improvement and provide it with several benefits, for example:
- Paperless documentation
- Real-time Activity tracking
- Traceability recording
- Genealogy
- Data management
- Quality control
- Real-time production data
- Seamless Logistics within the shopfloor
- Improve Machine Efficiency and reduce Downtime
However, in today’s world, just having the technology is not enough to provide a competitive advantage.
An organization can only achieve a true competitive advantage in the market by having an intelligently designed and implemented solution that allows the users to have simple but powerful user screens.
This is one of DELMIA Apriso’s main advantages and, along with its high compatibility and readiness to work with the most popular ERPs, like SAP and Oracle, PLM systems, and interface with machines and PLCs through standard interfaces, is what sets it apart from its competitors.
DELMIA Apriso’s out-of-the-box application allows for customers to model their solution in a flexible manner, considering their infrastructure, equipment, business processes, organizational structure, and individual preferences. It has a large number of usable components to build flexible solutions which can easily be adapted to the customer’s unique needs and everything, from the enabled modules, look and feel of the screens, business logic, and interfaces with external systems can be customized.
Most of this customization is done by the project team through the DELMIA Apriso Process Builder, which is part of DELMIA Apriso’s BPM Platform.
In DELMIA Apriso’s terminology, a process is a digital model of a process an enterprise relies on in order to function, and it is modeled in the Process Builder, the core application for defining dynamic, integrated, and reusable execution Processes, which are executed by Tasks, and are triggered by Orders that come into DELMIA Apriso from the organization’s external ERP systems (like SAP).
The project team uses a combination of layouts, screens, views, and operations to translate the business processes into Apriso processes so that the end-users can interact with the system.
The screens can be designed to have a layout where the views are placed, and the views contain the operations – built with a combination of the readily available business components, user scripts and database queries, or even by editing the HTML code itself – which are executed when there are any actions, such as a click of a button or receiving a signal from a machine.
Additionally, Process Builder provides different data managers that provide different functionalities. The most used ones are:
– Entity Manager: The typical starting screen for DELMIA Apriso. Shows all the projects, layouts, screens, views, and operations.
– Project Manager: Allows the users to divide entities into projects to make it easier to deploy changes to different servers.
– Dictionary Manager: Manage dictionary items to change the labels and descriptions shown to the end-users depending on their language.
– System Parameters and Lists Managers: Provides further options for customization and allows the end-users to modify values that can affect different screens without having to modify the actual screen.
– Determination Manager: Handles all the different determinations that can be used in different processes to select a certain action or method of processing things.
These are examples of screens with the same basic functionality, but customized to satisfy different customer needs and preferences:
– Dispatching Board:
– Operator Screen:
Apriso Process Builder gives you the control to better manage and revise business processes through their entire lifecycle. Leverage a Center of Excellence (COE) team to centrally author and distribute new versions of processes for better control and governance of process changes and updates. Improvement ideas provided by the plants or requested by HQ can be rapidly disseminated by the COE to all the locations, assuring consistent use of new best practices. Depending on the needs, the changes can be small and frequent, or larger and released less often.
In short, the DELMIA Apriso Process Builder is the main tool the project team uses to translate the organization’s processes into Apriso processes. It provides its users with multiple options for customization and enhancement so that the end solution is more compliant with the customers’ expectations and yields a better experience and results.
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