I. Development Background
The Fourth Industrial Revolution—Industry 4.0—represented by the foundational applications of big data, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, is ushering in a major and fundamental transformation for industry. Its core lies in the comprehensive cross-penetration of industry, industrial products, and services. This penetration is achieved through software, enabling the networking of products and services via the internet and other networks. New products and services will emerge alongside this change, thereby altering the way humanity lives and works, especially the relationship between humans and products, technologies, and processes. This necessitates a fundamental shift and adjustment in the development and production of industrial products to ensure the high-quality deployment of new processes and their transformation into economically beneficial outcomes.
Faced with the rise of "Made in China 2025" and Industry 4.0, the predicament of traditional process manufacturing enterprises has become more prominent. Overcapacity, insufficient technological innovation, low industrial concentration, and arduous energy conservation and emission reduction tasks will become stumbling blocks to the sustainable development of enterprises. For enterprise production, simply focusing on automated production equipment and automatic data collection is far from sufficient. After solving the automation of the production process, the future must integrate the internal logistics, information flow, and capital flow of enterprises, taking a market-oriented approach and cost control as the core, strengthening the transformation and innovation of product processes, and promoting the intelligent development of enterprises. Under this situation, enterprises must comprehensively extend to the high-end industrial chain, break away from the traditional model, and transform into a modern model, which requires breakthroughs in four aspects:
Ø Networking: With the development of information technology and network technology, networking has become an important enterprise management model for the future;
Flattening the organizational structure effectively reduces communication channels, improves corporate management efficiency and quality, minimizes management costs, and enhances employee autonomy and initiative.
Ø Flexibility effectively resolves disputes arising from the grouping and decentralization of organizational structures;
Alliances will lead to closer cooperation and strategic alliances among enterprises, enabling them to complement each other's strengths and enhance their core competitiveness.
II. Koyo Manufacturing Execution System (MES)
Koyo Manufacturing Execution System (MES) was developed in this context. It provides a comprehensive information solution for process manufacturing enterprises (such as chemical, metallurgical, cement, and waste treatment companies) to move towards Industry 4.0 smart factories, enabling them to accelerate their progress towards "Made in China 2025" based on their already relatively high levels of automation. At the management level, it advocates for networked, flat, flexible, and integrated management reforms. At the technical level, it acquires real-time production information through IoT technology and integrates closely with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to establish a highly flexible, personalized, and digital production management model for products and services, making all information visible, knowable, and controllable. Koyo's MES is gradually helping process manufacturing enterprises connect with information interconnection technologies, enabling dialogue between people and machines, and between machines; helping process manufacturing enterprises improve their production and technology management levels, build core competitiveness; and ultimately helping enterprises achieve intelligent production and build smart factories.
1. Building a bridge between decision-makers and implementers
Koyo Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is a production information management system for the shop floor execution layer of process manufacturing enterprises. It sits between the management and control layers, primarily serving the enterprise's production management and scheduling. As a bridge and engine, it fully integrates with systems such as Production Control Unit (PLC), Distribution Control System (DCS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Product Management (PLM), effectively solving the last mile of intelligent management and control for industrial enterprises. Through a visual platform, it achieves horizontal integration between various business operations such as planning, scheduling, supply chain, and shop floor, eliminating information silos between different business operations and clearly showcasing the enterprise.
From production planning and scheduling to production organization, operation, quality control, energy consumption, material balance, and performance, the system provides comprehensive vertical support for real-time databases, PCS measurement points, graphical configuration and display, reports, SMS, and operation monitoring platforms. This provides effective means for dynamic production management, helping companies reduce costs, tap potential for efficiency, save energy and reduce emissions, and improve quality.
2. Reduce production costs and break through management dilemmas
In the four common development stages of process manufacturing enterprises (new product and technology R&D, engineering construction, production operation, and sales promotion), the enterprise's cost structure is concentrated in the core link of the value chain—the production and manufacturing stage. Reducing costs in the production stage can significantly increase profit margins—this is the key to solving the management dilemma of cost reduction, efficiency improvement, quality enhancement, revenue generation, and sustainable development for process manufacturing enterprises. In response to this, Koyo Manufacturing Execution System (MES) proposes the following design concepts:
Market-oriented: With the goal of meeting market demand, we comprehensively consider various factors such as product system, production line conditions and market environment, and flexibly adopt two management models: inventory-based and order-based, to make full use of the company's existing resources and meet the personalized needs of users.
Ø With finance as the core: Real-time reporting of information such as input and output, energy consumption, materials, and labor in the production process, realizing the synchronization of "logistics, information flow, and capital flow", enabling timely and accurate monitoring of enterprise production costs and improving market competitiveness;
Ø Quality-centric approach: Implement full-process quality control and tracking from raw material intake to product delivery to ensure product quality to the greatest extent possible;
Ø Equipment as a guarantee: Build equipment management that covers the entire lifecycle of assets, from planning and design to installation, commissioning, operation and maintenance, and decommissioning, to ensure safe and reliable production, improve equipment utilization, and reduce enterprise maintenance costs;
Ø Production execution process control: Adapt to changes in the external and internal environment, and provide various flexible means to respond quickly, maintain production capacity, and achieve on-time, on-quantity, and on-quality delivery when changes or abnormalities occur in the execution process;
Supply chain management covers all key business operations of an enterprise, from receiving an order to its completion, from raw materials entering the factory to products leaving the factory. It achieves closed-loop management with visual tracking, shortens delivery time, and improves on-time delivery rate.
3. Functional layout based on process management
For process-oriented manufacturing enterprises based on a networked, flat, flexible, and integrated management model, in order to truly achieve optimized management of various resources such as personnel, capital, materials, equipment, processes, and environment, with production planning as the leading factor, production processes and material movement as the main line, and workshop management as the core, and to realize a high degree of integration and collaboration between real-time production processes and the value chain of people, finance, and materials, ultimately moving from routine management to refined closed-loop management and achieving agile manufacturing, the information system must have at least the following four major functions:
Real-time monitoring of the production process: Based on the enterprise's underlying production control system, it ensures safe, economical, high-yield, and high-quality operation, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the enterprise.
Ø Workshop management based on production process: Guiding and maintaining the smooth operation and normal production order of the entire product production line, all links and elements, using several large combined equipment units (workshops);
Material movement and material balance: Based on real-time monitoring of the production process, a comprehensive logistics management system is established for the enterprise from raw material entry to product exit, which plans, executes, monitors, and records the movement of materials. At the same time, a plant-wide material balance model is established, which is used to calculate material balance and yield. The production process data after integration and correction by the material balance system is statistically balanced and compared with historical data and production plan data for analysis and tracking. The system comprehensively manages the receipt and payment flow information of major materials from all aspects such as material measurement, storage, movement, and balance.
Energy Management: Establish an energy consumption model to collect, balance, and statistically manage the production and consumption data of public works resources such as water, electricity, steam, and wind throughout the plant. Provide the dispatching and production departments with information on the operation of public works systems and the energy consumption of equipment, and provide basic data for production cost accounting and energy consumption statistics.
Koyo Manufacturing Execution System (MES) combines the company's 20 years of professional experience serving process-oriented enterprises, absorbs advanced enterprise informatization construction ideas from home and abroad, and follows the relevant industry guidelines of the "12th Five-Year Plan" and "13th Five-Year Plan". It integrates and optimizes a series of the company's informatization products, resulting in significant improvements in functional layout, which can be summarized in the following four sets of figures: 1 data center, 1 BI decision analysis center, 2 communication interfaces, and 11 functional modules.
Ø One data center: A data center for real-time production data acquisition, storage, analysis, and display, with a real-time database at its core;
Ø One BI decision analysis center: Based on a comprehensive indicator system, establish different analytical subject areas to enhance the rapid retrieval and analysis of information;
Two communication interfaces: one for the control layer (DCS, PLC, etc.) and one for the business operations layer (ERP, etc.);
Ø 11 functional modules: including process monitoring, production planning and scheduling management, production statistics management, on-site management, process management, energy management, quality management, equipment management, supply chain management, safety management, and cost management.
Figure 2: Framework of Koyo Manufacturing Execution System (MES) Program
III. Typical Cases
MES management system for a Fortune 500 company in Shandong
A Fortune Global 500 company in Shandong Province is a large-scale enterprise with eight production bases and total assets of 126.9 billion yuan, integrating textiles, dyeing and finishing, garments, home textiles, and thermal power. It has been listed among the world's top 500 companies for two consecutive years, among the world's top 500 famous brands for four consecutive years, and among China's top 500 companies for 12 consecutive years. In 2010, the company achieved sales revenue of 15.667 billion yuan and profits of 5.311 billion yuan.
The workshop MES management system, designed, developed, and implemented by Koyo Corporation, primarily serves the company's production management and scheduling, spanning the entire production process, comprehensively measuring energy consumption, improving equipment and personnel safety, reducing production costs, and providing production economic indicators and decision-making basis for company leaders.
The system is centered on production management and includes real-time monitoring, equipment management, production process management, process management, quality management, scheduling management, and product batch management. It aims to control efficiency, quality, cost, and performance, while providing data to the enterprise's ERP system to help the enterprise establish an integrated and real-time ERP/MES/PCS information system, ultimately achieving integrated management of the company's overall control.
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