Target group:

• Companies with Fastems flexible manufacturing systems (FMS)

Challenge:

Using a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) can automate the production of machine tools and thus enables unmanned production as well as increasing the production capacity and capacity utilization. One of the market leaders for FFS is the Finnish manufacturer Fastems with offices throughout Europe. The system also contain functions for material handling and can have different sizes of machine and material pallets include in the same system. Fastems has its own control system (called MMS), which includes all major operating functions, including task / job execution, the set-up of the pallets, the resource management and production management for the FFS. For users of Fastems FMS / MMS challenges arise in the planning and acquisition-side integration of FFS in the entire production, because it is virtually a "black box": the orders or jobs must on the one hand entered manually with quantity, deadline item number etc. at the MMS. On the other hand MMS pretends the execution order by itself. Companies that perform on the Fastems FFS not complete processing, but continue processing the semi-finished products thus produced in a row operations that have a planning and synchronization problem. 4FAS solves this problem by a bi-directional exchange of information with Fastems MMS as well as an additional module for range planning machinery in the 4APS multi-resource planning.

Solution:

4FAS supports the planning, acquisition and integration of Fastems FFS with MMS in the individual, job, variant manufacturers, small series and mass production. 4FAS allows

• significantly increase the predictability of total orders,
• to reduce production cycle times through the synchronization of any subsequent operations on the FFS,
• to pass the finely planned worklist and also the order of processing automatically without manual intervention at the MMS and
• to get the actual quantities and the actual status directly from MMS.

Benefits:

• productivity ↑
• planning ↑
• transparency ↑
• throughput time ↓