Proplanner’s Manufacturing Execution System (MES) Architecture is designed around a strong Bill Of Process (BOP) authored in the Assembly Planner Database from detailed Activities and their child Worksteps which link mBOM part consumption, and shop floor tooling requirements with variant Model and Option configuration rules.
This BOP is published to our Shop Floor MES database with date, series or serial number effectivity and thus embeds all the configuration logic necessary to tell shop floor workers and automation exactly all the tasks to do using which parts and with what tools/parameter values (torque, test, etc.) on every specific product produced. Since this variant logic is embedded in the Proplanner BOP and published to the tooling at every work cycle, it is no longer necessary to codify this variant logic complexity within the tools themselves.
With Proplanner MES, the shop floor automation only needs to be coded to perform a wide array of tasks and Proplanner’s MES application will activate only those specific tasks needed as products move through each station. Using this approach the manufacturing configuration and variant complexity resides in only the Proplanner BOP (where it is subsequently documented) thus reducing not only the effort, time and expense of coding in the machine tools themselves, but also the potential quality issues and trouble-shooting efforts arising from inconsistency caused by automation programming and update errors.
Perhaps even more importantly, Proplanner’s architecture allows the automation engineers to code each machine tool (i.e. HMI, DC Torque Tool, PLC, Scanner, Andon Tower, etc) with the exact same logic in each station. This station-based commonality, allows the process engineer to quickly and easily move tasks between stations to achieve high levels of production capacity and productivity with minimal-to-no shop floor changeover required.
The Assembly Planner, Shop Floor MES and even the Factboard Andon systems can be deployed on-prem (Enterprise license only) or via the Microsoft Azure cloud. Databases use encryption at rest, are accessed using your corporate Single Sign On system (SSO) and communicate securely via HTTPS 443 ports. Proplanner also provides a robust IOT service application which resides on internal subnets and can broker a secure connection between SFV MES and non-secured protocols such as OPC Classic as is commonly required for DC Torque Tools, PLC’s and Andon light tower systems.
