Goodwin International has gone live with Seiki 50 resource assembly level scheduler software in its valves division – successfully enabling manufacturing execution management at the shopfloor level.
Production director Nigel Brown explains that, with most customers being oil majors and international engineering contractors, Goodwin has to offer short lead times and mission-critical, on-time delivery stats.
Hence the importance of shopfloor planning and scheduling and the new system, which, although stand-alone, works with Seiki's Networked Manufacturing System (NMS) manufacturing execution system.
"Seiki offered a complete machine monitoring and assembly level scheduling system that supported our key objectives," explains Brown.
"The primary benefit we anticipate is an increase in operational visibility, which will support our wider business planning [on SAP]. We will also have more accurate decision making capabilities, as well as more effective utilisation of resources."
The Scheduler has already been integrated with the NMS system, comprising production monitoring and shopfloor data capture – with Seiki's Jobpack control software due for installation in the next few weeks.
On the machine monitoring side, 16 of Goodwin's CNC machines (solely used by the valves division) will each get their own PC running NMS, enabling the firm to carry out queue management while also automatically monitoring and managing the machines.