Entries Tagged: Productivity

Optimize Material Flow and Increase your Manufacturing Productivity with Tecnomatix 9

by Markus Erlmann | 01 Sep 2009

Have you ever had the opportunity to visit the shop floor of a manufacturing company? I have … to be more specific, I worked on an assembly line for textile machines before I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany). I was fascinated with the traffic on the shop floor – all of the forklifts driving around and the amount of workers carrying material from one workstation to another. Of course this was more than 20 years ago.

Today companies optimize material flow to reduce transportation, which is one of the seven wastes targeted by lean manufacturing practices. Reducing inventory costs and transportation devices can be achieved as well. The optimization of material flow can be a complex task that is influenced by many factors, like cycle time and required number of parts per hour, number and type of transportation devices, storage space at the line, delivery concepts like just-in-sequence and much more.

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Don’t Lose, Reuse with Tecnomatix 9

by Markus Erlmann | 23 Jul 2009

The recently published Aberdeen study Assembly, CAM and Process Planning for the Modern Manufacturer finds that the Best-in-Class manufacturing companies are focused on productivity. Improving the manufacturing process planning by reapplying best practices is one of the keys to increase productivity.

This seems obvious as reusing proven manufacturing solutions is faster than reinventing the wheel all the time. Manufacturing companies already reuse resources and processes today. But how are they handling this? Here we need to get a closer look at the manufacturing process planning workflow.

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Increase Manufacturing Productivity of Automated Production Lines

by Markus Erlmann | 13 Jul 2009

What about the manufacturing productivity? Let’s have a look at automated production lines. They are e.g. used in the automotive industry. A good overview provides this movie from KUKA, a robot manufacturer.

Today all these robots are programmed and validated in a virtual environment. In addition to the robots, system level control is required. This is accomplished with Programmable Logic Controllers or short PLC. They handle the decision making for the line such as material flow or control the fixtures and grippers which are locating the parts in place during the welding process. These PLCs are generally programmed with applications provided by the PLC vendor. As you could see in the video, the robots and PLCs need to communicate. E.g. the robots start welding only after the grippers are closed and the grippers open again only after the robots finished the welding.

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ebm-papst Increase Planning Productivity by 30 Percent

by Markus Erlmann | 03 Jul 2009

Is your laptop cooled by a fan? I guess so … it might be one from ebm-papst, one of our customers. But this is just one of the industries ebm-papst sells their products to.

They use flexible manufacturing lines to react fast to changing customer demands. Mr. Weisser, plant manager location St.Georgen, said they face manufacturing quantity variation of up to 200 percent. The challenge is to design a production system with an intelligent balancing between highest quality, maximum flexibility and an optimized price. From his point of view, only an integrated and digital planning solution can solve this equation.

Mr. Weisser reports a 30 percent reduction in overall planning time by using the Tecnomatix solution.

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Designed a great Product – and now?

by Markus Erlmann | 30 Jun 2009

You designed a product and it covers all the requirements which your customers requested. Now the question is: How do I get it out to the market? Means, how do I manufacture my product as fast as possible?

With this post I want to go into more details about how Tecnomatix 9 helps manufacturing companies to master the challenges I described in my previous post.

Based on the product data the manufacturing engineer defines the manufacturing processes. Today this is not a sequential workflow any more as it was in the past. Product and process design are already running in parallel; at least partially. This requires close communication between product and manufacturing engineers.

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Ziyon Amram about Tecnomatix 9

by Markus Erlmann | 25 Jun 2009

In this video Ziyon Amram, Vice President Tecnomatix Digital Manufacturing solutions, talks about the value of Tecnomatix 9 and how it helps manufacturing companies to manage these challenges.