BUSINESS
Paperless Production in Practice
Further Steps Towards Industry 4.0
in Dormer Pramet
The Dormer Pramet company intensively innovates and optimizes their processes. For the
management of the whole company, including production, uses SAP system and has already for
some time been considering further digitalization of production. The company’s experts, together
with experts from S&T, have prepared a detailed concept where they have mapped all the fields and
designed a solution.
Dormer Pramet is an important global producer and
supplier of machining tools. Its wide product range
includes both plate tools, which are produced in the
Šumperk production plant, and monolithic rotational
tools, which are mostly produced in sister plant in São
Paulo, Brazil. The company provides wide range of
sales and technical support via its network of more
than twenty dealerships. Deliveries are managed by
a top level distributional and logistic network which
uses several distribution centers on every continent.
Collection of shopfloor information without
connection to the machines does not allow fast status
update; it is largely dependent on the human factor
and it also limits the amount of information that
can be tracked this way. On shopfloor management
side, printing instructions costs time and money and
printed information cannot be updated easily. But is it
even possible in to get rid of paper completely? Will
it decrease efficiency or knowledge sharing? With
concept of paperless production - can all necessary
information flows be achieved from instructions
and
manufacturing
documentation
through
various supportive records to quality management
documentation? The proposed goals can be
summarized into four digitalization areas, where using
SAP tools from S&T will help to make production
management easier and more efficient.
PROVIDED BENEFITS:
Substantial reduction of paper documentation
Up-to-date information for everyone
Easier production reporting
Real-time tracking and more precise registration of
the tools and fixtures lifetime
Visualization of workcenter statuses
Paper documentation in electronic form, always up
to date
Paper documents - orders, guides, routings - were
used in the workshops for management and tracking
of production. The goal was to replace the paper
documents with electronic ones as much as possible
and thus ensure that the documents will be available
faster and always in the right version.
24 ǀ POSITIV 4/2020
How does the situation look after the implementation
of this solution? The necessary documentation is in
an updated form available online, directly on the
operators’ tablets. Additionally, in digital form are
available also the final documents for quality tracking,
for traceability of components and responsibility.
Digitalization and easier production reporting
Production reporting was done originally via PC-shopfloor operators and technicians entered
their reports of produced pieces directly into
the SAP system. The new goal was to perform
production reporting on mobile tablets, with
simplified applications for easy operation and with
ability to read additional information directly from
the workcenter controller units. This way, all the
necessary information will be collected in real time
and on one place.
This goal was also fulfilled: the production reporting
is done efficiently with use of new applications.
A maximal amount of information is collected
automatically—according to user login to the
workplace and the order, and also by direct usage
of information from controller unit of the machine.
The result – achievement of maximal freshness
of information. At the same time with bigger
volume and accuracy of the data, the data entry is
now less demanding for the user. It is possible to
analyze production costs better, to flexibly manage
production process and related stock.
Real-time tracking of location and remaining
lifetime of tools
Tracking very expensive tools, which are necessary
for production, is an important topic in Dormer
Pramet. The tools with fixtures are located in the
storage cabinets or directly in the toll-containers of
the given machining center. So far, the actual usage
and location of tools with fixtures was not tracked in
the system. The remaining lifetime of the tools was
registered manually on paper labels next by each
tool. Important goal of the new solution was realtime electronic registration of the current location of
the tool and fixtures, independent of manual input,
as well as tracking of the remaining lifetime of the
tool. Both captured directly from the workcenter.