This data orchestration news from GE Digital highlights a few themes engineers have worked on for a long time. First, if you know how product development works, new products often are born from a customer problem. Check out the quote from the customer below about this product. Also, finding a way to consolidate data from disparate sources and present them in a way that enables decision making has been a holy grail. Many supplier executives have told me they’ve solved it over the years. Here is another advance in that direction.
Summary:
- Digitized solution increases manufacturing throughput by overcoming variations due to supply chain constraints and changing consumer demands
- Allows companies to unify, transform, orchestrate, and manage variances in manufacturing product data across different assets, systems, processes, and plants
- Easily connects disparate manufacturing product data from various sources and transforms it into factory floor friendly information
- Provides audit trail of variances and updates to manufacturing product data for visibility and compliance
GE Digital announced Proficy Orchestration Hub. This new software solution provides out-of-the-box tools to unify manufacturing product information from disparate data systems, transforms and organizes raw business-oriented information into production-ready formats, and orchestrates the information across factory floor systems at a single site or multiple sites.
Accurate product manufacturing data, that is readily available during production execution, decreases waste by about 10% per plant annually from less rework and rejects. It also reduces production delays and compliance issues, leading to approximately 5% improvement in on-time delivery and 1% decrease in compliance-related costs.
“We collaborated with GE Digital on the development of this solution to support improved accuracy and efficiency in identifying and implementing specification changes,” said Kevin Briggs, Architect, IS Operations for The J.M. Smucker Company. “By integrating systems and digitizing operational product data management, we can create greater flexibility in manufacturing environments, reduce waste and costs, ensure consistent quality and compliance and increase production throughput.”
With supply chain issues, more products and/or regulatory standards, production can get out of sync with the latest manufacturing product data, resulting in lower quality, increased waste, and operations headaches. Proficy Orchestration Hub records and allows users to analyze the updates to manufacturing product data at a given plant. It also stores deviations and comments, recorded as variances, to provide visibility into a plant’s adoption of the changes. This allows manufacturers to decrease quality variability due to ad-hoc modifications as well as the non-productive time and manual efforts trying to execute standard production work.
Companies have been struggling with various manufacturing product data orchestration issues such as spreadsheets with tens of tabs and thousands of rows, paper records that can be inconsistent and overwhelming, and multiple recipe changes that have to be coordinated across production lines. The “new normal” with its supply chain issues has acerbated these traditional challenges as companies are forced to modify recipes to work around shortages.
“Proficy Orchestration Hub helps manufacturers solve common challenges such as inefficiencies in production due to inaccurate product data, siloed and custom approaches to product data, compliance risks, and lack of quality standardization,” said Richard Kenedi, General Manager of GE Digital’s Manufacturing and Digital Plant business. “For companies that are tired of cobbling together plant systems or manually trying to capture the right product manufacturing data on paper, this solution can help increase throughput, reduce waste, and improve quality with manufacturing product data management at their fingertips.”
