Japanese

In order to survive in the era of New Normal, Design and Manufacturing Digital Collaboration Starting with BOP

This is the last column of this series. In previous two columns, we explained about the features of BOP such as role, necessity and effective utilization of BOP by industry. This time, we would like to explain the various merits of BOP based on the experience of implementing/introducing BOP by each company/in various companies and the new value of PLM.

Case 1. Digitalization of work instruction sheet

In Japanese manufacturing industry, the manufacturing process is dependent on each factory, and most of the companies are managing their manufacturing process individually on manual operations by paperwork or Excel sheet. In particular, the preparation of work instruction sheets in multi-product production is time consuming and effort taking process as it is dependent on individuals. In addition, the sharing and passing on manufacturing knowledge have become a challenge due to the aging of production engineers and increase in number of retirees.

According to NEC, “BOP” is a database of manufacturing knowledge that includes the information related to the equipment, jigs and tools, molds, etc. used in the process and process sequence defined in the hierarchical structure and information that links and manages the documents such as QC process charts, work order sheets, and process diagram, which are called three main forms of manufacturing.

Production engineers can pass on their manufacturing knowledge and quickly train young engineers by consolidating information for process design as a BOP. Furthermore, various forms such as manufacturing procedures can be automatically created with integrated management of BOM and BOP and with this, errors and workload of manual operations can be significantly reduced. In addition, standardization of manufacturing processes is promoted, and reuse of such standardized manufacturing processes allows the engineers to improve the productivity and maintain the uniform quality level in process design.

Case 2. Start-up of global manufacturing sites and speed up the production at an optimum location

BOM and BOP, which are standard information for manufacturing, are highly effective when they are integrated and managed globally. New manufacturing site can be launched quickly by standardizing and consolidating manufacturing processes on a PLM system that were managed individually by each factory, and by transferring such manufacturing processes to domestic and overseas manufacturing sites. This enables simultaneous launch of new products worldwide and maintain consistent manufacturing quality across global manufacturing sites .

Since information pertaining to all manufacturing sites are integrated and managed by the PLM system, even in the event of unforeseen circumstances such as consideration of alternative production at optimum location in response to demand fluctuations and natural disasters, it is possible to continue the business without missing any opportunity by quickly identifying the factory with alternative production possibilities and flexibly transferring the production to such identified factory.