Polymers International Enhances Customer Service through Automated Shipment Tracking

In order to meet customer expectations by supplying a wide variety of packaging units, from 36 to 1000 spoons per package, a new production and packaging line needed to be built. DeSter wanted to achieve higher production capacity, lower cycle time and a high degree of operator friendliness with this new production line.

Factory automation applications must be equipped to handle and monitor the myriads of information from attached devices. For plastic manufacturing applications, the boiler control system plays a critical role by gathering and regulating information to ensure production is accurate and smooth. In this particular case, the customer combines eight subsystems that include power meters, water meters, alarm output, displays, and I/O status to be controlled by several intelligent controllers with Modbus RTU interface. The Modbus TCP protocol is used for this application due to the distance. System Requirements: • Modbus serial to Modbus TCP translation • Multiple slaves/masters support • Automatic Modbus TCP response time detection

Ascend operations must access multiple software systems to manage day-to-day operations in an effective and secure manner. These systems generate large sets of data which contain critical information pertaining to management systems, planning and cost information in business systems and energy consumption. As a result, Ascend management was challenged with creating relevant reports reflecting performance measures in overall context of their operational process. The company’s previous process entailed collecting and analyzing data manually which was not effective, since the information collected was generated after the fact, and was too complex for collaborative use across the organization.

The client was running a legacy material flow tracking system and wanted to replace the system with a more effective one as the system was increasingly expensive to maintain and support and also was not extendable. The client's IT landscape was filled with modern applications and it was difficult to interface the material flow tracking system with modern applications.

The implementation of ERP software in a Discrete Manufacturing organization needs to be strategic, irrespective of its size and capacity. The client had already implemented an ERP system which fulfilled their requirements but was not efficient enough. Efficiency here meant Synchronized Planning, Updating and Multisite Planning. Planning at client’s place was done outside the ERP system. Lack of proper synchronization to the ERP system paved way to huge delays in the changes getting updated in the system. These delays caused disruption in achieving delivery schedules. Multisite Planning is a solution to an organization which has multiple production units (may or may not be geographically separated) and thus needs planning across these units to synchronize production activities within them. The client also has multiple factories and hence Production Planning control is very essential in their case. Since Multisite planning was not possible with Baan ERP system, this was another bottleneck for the client.

Gaudlitz was looking to achieve a lean management and production approach so as to improve production efficiency. Workers in the night shift were also taking a very long time to collect data.