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.