Products

How to master material flow throughout the plant

By Zac Elliott

Webinar on-demand: Optimizing intralogistics with the digital twin

Electronics manufacturing is more complex today than ever before. On top of the challenges created by smaller lot sizes, shorter lead times and increasing raw material costs, supply chain issues and internal part shortages are now driving manufacturers to increase buffer stocks. The knock-on effects of all that are high investment costs and tight profit margins – even relatively small miscalculations around material can impact quality and profitability!

That’s why smart management of the intralogistics and material flow within the factory has become critical. Manufacturers need just-in-time material logistics so that only the materials needed on the shop floor are allocated, and excess warehouse stock can be eliminated through high accuracy, real-time inventory management.

Digital twin logistics addresses the problem by giving manufacturers the ability to plan production and logistics according to capacity. With solutions like Siemens’ Opcenter Intra-Plant Logistics (Opcenter IPL), manufacturers can get shop floor work-in-progress (WIP) updates from machines and MES systems and deliver production material quantities based on WIP with just-in-time replenishment, removing costly excess material WIP from the shop floor. They can also react to changes in production and improve the delivery plan when needed, for example, re-filling material quantity as needed for Kanban.

In this webinar on-demand, we dive deep into ways manufacturers can utilize Opcenter IPL for intralogistics automation and to increase flexibility, quality, and profitability. Join us to learn about:

  • Delivering raw material and sub-assemblies to the right place at the right time
  • Managing logistics operations on the shop floor
  • Integrating with scheduling, MES, ERP, AGVs, automatic storage solutions, real-time material tracking and connected electronics (IoT)

And much more!

Leave a Reply

This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/valor/2022/08/01/how-to-master-material-flow-throughout-the-plant/