Award Winning UX for Manufacturing Process Management with Teamcenter Easy Plan

By Kerri Doyle

Keeping production lines balanced and preventing bottlenecks, while utilizing resources well, is a complicated task. Much more so when different product variants are manufactured on a single line. An innovative digital manufacturing solution will help you achieve your manufacturing process management objectives more efficiently. Read more about Siemens award winning UX with Teamcenter Easy Plan, and the innovators who are behind it.

Every year Siemens honors outstanding researchers and developers as Inventors of the Year in five categories: Newcomers, Open Innovation, Outstanding Invention, Lifetime Achievement and Design and User Experience. Their innovations have significantly contributed to the company’s success while also benefiting society. The latest winners for Design and User Experience are our own Noga Baron, Varda Senerman, and Hadar Hillel. They invented a visual user interface that helps Industrial Engineers using Easy Plan identify bottlenecks in a mixed production line, making the line balancing task easier and quicker.

For Industrial and Manufacturing Engineers, mixed production lines mean that line balancing becomes a very complicated challenge. This is because different product variants require different operations to be done on them in the different stations. However, the workload in each station should still be as close as possible to the takt time for every variant. This is especially important for the more common variants in the production mix. Therefore, variant probability should also be considered. A bubble chart allows visualizing two dimensions of the variants – workload and probability – on a single axis per station. This makes it extremely easy to find the issues that are most important to handle.
Noga Baron, Senior UX Expert at Siemens Digital Industries Software

Manufacturing Process Management with Teamcenter Easy Plan

Easy Plan supports the Digital Twin of Production with a task-oriented web solution for manufacturing process management and planning, and a best-in-class user experience, designed to help you increase operational efficiency. With Easy Plan, you can create and manage your manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM), and reconcile your MBOM with your engineering BOM (EBOM). You can standardize and re-use assembly processes across multiple plants, author electronic work instructions to be shared with shop floor operators, perform detailed time analysis, balance production lines, and much more.

As shown in the video below, and as noted in the recent blog authored by Noga Baron, Easy Plan provides an intuitive user experience for manufacturing planning.

Teamcenter Easy Plan uses award-winning bubble visual technology with line balancing capabilities to help users easily identify bottlenecks and under utilization in a mixed production line.