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Improved Process Control and Data Visibility by Moving from a Home Grown System to a Scalable MES
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
Applicable Industries
- Electronics
- Equipment & Machinery
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
Norautron Suzhou, a subsidiary of Norautron Group, specializes in the manufacturing of high-mix, low-volume industrial electronics. In 2012, the company realized that their home-grown MES system could no longer support the growing demand from customers. The challenges they faced included increasing customer requirements and market regulations for mission-critical products. Products that need to work in tough environmental conditions or demand extremely high reliability like the ones Norautron makes for maritime, defense, and medical industries require traceability down to a single connection on a single electronic component. Also, process control and material management, including RMA is a must. However, the precise and high-level traceability and strict process control and management can only be achieved by a professional MES system, where Norautron’s home-grown system fell short. Ever-increasing time and labor cost while using and maintaining the home-grown system is another issue that troubled management. In the past, Norautron input tremendous labor-hours to create the trace record manually for each part and product to fulfill the traceability requirement and assure product quality. With increasing national wages, Norautron Suzhou found the labor cost, as a proportion of the whole operation cost rose so sharply year after year that company profitability was soon likely to be adversely affected.
About The Customer
Norautron Suzhou Co., Ltd. is a subsidiary of Norautron Group, which is headquartered in Horton, Norway. Norautron Group is a full-service electronics manufacturer that provides services ranging from design, test development, prototyping, PCBA, cable harnessing, electro mechanics, advanced box build, system integration, and industrialization to product lifecycle management and after-sales services. Norautron Suzhou focuses on the manufacturing of high-mix, low-volume industrial electronics, especially ruggedized-type products for maritime, defense, medical and other industrial equipment that require extremely high reliability in tough environments. In 2012, Norautron Suzhou realized that their home-grown MES system could no longer support the growing demand from customers.
The Solution
Norautron Suzhou chose Aegis Software as their MES provider. Aegis is a mature and global company which offers sales, consultancy, deployment, training, R&D, integration and on-going support across three continents, and provides an enterprise level platform that supports Norautron’s facilities located in Norway, Sweden and China. As a software company that offers the most machine programming and data acquisition connectors with equipment vendors in the market, Aegis provides more standard integration interfaces than any competitor. When compared with similar MES providers, Aegis has been proven to be more advanced at documentation handling, including powerful BOM and CAD importing and cleaning tools, interactive and visual work instruction design, and electric revision control. In addition, FactoryLogix provides total traceability for materials, tools and fixtures, and the level-4 component traceability can meet the needs of Norautron’s most demanding customers. Furthermore, FactoryLogix is a solution designed with a true understanding of manufacturing. As result, it has flexible process definition, production planning and batch management, and user-configurable dashboards and reports which adapt to any manufacturing requirement.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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