Felix George

By Yen Kheng Tan and Felix George

In today’s mass production era, the world is making things (products and systems) so quickly and systematically in huge volume. The demand for these products is very high and, at the same time, consumers are still in search for a need for making the production very personalized. Hence, the “one mold fits all” approach may not seem to be enough. The present approach is facing the lack of networking between the automation pyramid levels, that is, especially between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) layers and, in turn, communicating directly with the lower layers is not possible. This missing communication among the process equipment like machineries and field control systems like PLCs at the production shop floors implies that customization at the product layer for the consumer is still in progress in classical manufacturing. Mini-MES is a new concept being introduced here to solve the existing techniques reported in the literature and is followed by industry best practices. The novel mini-MES platform provides an avenue for the technology process level (the most bottom layer) to interplay interconnectivity and interoperability with its higher levels until the above pain points are addressed holistically. The chapter is going to focus mainly on the factory production of digital manufacturing and on describing the 3-Cs implementation plan, the enabling technology, and the achievable outcome ahead.

Part of the book: Smart Manufacturing