SMES take the MES route

Payal Agrawal
The Economic Times (Delhi edition)
In an increasingly competitive scenario with rapidly fluctuating customer demands, process flexibility and production scheduling is gaining significance for manufacturing industries, particularly the auto components sector.

The Indian automotive components manufacturing industry, largely composed of Tier II and Tier III firms, include original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and other components manufacturers from the SME sector. The main problem here is to meet the fluctuating demands of automobile assemblers and fabricators who cater to both the domestic and the export markets. According to Milind Naik, Proprietor, Threa Dwell India, an auto components manufacturing company, “There is a lot of fluctuation in customer demands. In this scenario, automotive component manufacturers, particularly SMEs, need to think along production scheduling lines.”

It is equally essential for SMEs to deploy a system, which can track orders and the production status on a real-time basis. A seamless link has to be established between the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and the manufacturing facility to meet these fluctuating demands. Says Vijay Bhatt, Director, Panorama Automotive Industries, “Demands in this sector have become more dynamic, and often vary in terms of lot size and component specifications. Accommodating these demands requires extensive process flexibility and production scheduling.”

In general, manufacturers, especially SMEs, do not have the technical support to assess such abrupt demand patterns. This has prevented them from achieving sustainable production. According to Manoj Kumar Gala, MD, Precise Auto Ancillaries, “Customer demands in the auto components manufacturing sector have a very fluctuating nature. This has been a hindrance for auto components manufacturers, specially the SMEs in the domain.”

However, industry insiders are of the view that IT solutions and Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software can be implemented to resolve the issues. “IT solutions such as Manufacturing Execution System (MES) have proved essential to achieve sustainable production in manufacturing industries. SMEs in the domain should make efforts for large-scale implementation of MES,” opined Alok Sharma, CEO, Forge India.

MES is an IT-enabled solution, which manages the overall shop floor operations, and automatically reports production information and online enquiries to the production floor data centre on real-time basis. Some of the industrial tasks that SMEs can perform using MES include order processing, receipt generation, production scheduling, quality control, shipping and maintenance.

As a whole, MES instructs, begins, responds to, and reports on shop floor operations from the beginning of production until the product is finally manufactured. There are several core areas in the auto components manufacturing domain, which must receive greater focus to achieve sustainable production. With the application of MES, SMEs in the sector can successfully target these areas.

Production Scheduling

With the globalisation of auto industry, customer demands have become more versatile in terms of lot size, material and dimensional specifications, and delivery timelines. Production scheduling is a critical shop floor activity and SMEs in the auto components sector must optimise this function for greater benefits. Using MES, information can be delivered to the shop floor facility on a real-time basis, which will improve the production schedule by optimising all the manufacturing phases.

“We have implemented MES, which, along with our ERP setup, enables bidirectional information flow across the supply chain, thus integrating manufacturers and distributors in a seamless manner,” said Sharma.

This would help SMEs quickly take required actions to reschedule the production plan, thus minimising the Work in Process (WIP) and unscheduled downtimes.