Our team has developed a Manufacturing Execution System that ensures effective execution of the manufacturing operations and improves production output.
TopTeep is a company with years of experience in management and optimization of manufacturing processes for various industries. By providing tools and expertise TopTeep tends to help manufacturing companies to digitize production, improve their process, become more efficient and cut the manufacturing cost.
TopTeep came to KoloTree looking for a partner to realize an idea for the MES, Manufacturing Execution System, that will be the main tool for helping their clients in the process of improving manufacturing organization and productivity. The main goal was to develop a cloud-based MES service that can be used by many different manufacturing companies. At the start, TopTeep targeted the plastic manufacturing industry, especially injection molding and extrusion types of the production. Because of this, plan was to develop MES solution specialized for those types of industries that will stand out from the competition by simplifying the usage and putting focus on the key aspects of the plastic industry business while putting aside many complicated features that are usually offered by general-purpose solutions that just introduce a burden and noise for the users within targeted industries. Still, for the solution to be called a Manufacturing Execution System, there are many features that must be supported.
The key aspect of the MES system, for sure, is the production data acquisition. To enable high precision of gathered data and to make the process more efficient, a fully automated acquisition system was needed which would constantly monitor production lines inside a factory and gather key production parameters.
Acquired data further needs to be used to enable monitoring of the resources allocation and production status, tracking flow of products, resource management, quality management, etc.
A crucial thing for the process management is to provide efficient ways for performing statistical analysis, like production performance, product quality, production resource availability, and many more. To support all this, the system needs to have many different statistical views or dashboards with different kinds of statistical graphs, specially adapted for the specific user, and many kinds of reports for the production process.
Besides all the previous, the special aspect of the TopTeep MES system is production planning and optimization of production resource utilization. Therefore, the system must help the users to create production plans and to react to unplanned situations by being able to recognize them early and easily adjust the further plan to meet the deadlines in production. For this, it is essential to back up production planners in their regular activities, to easily create the production plan and adjust it by scheduling or rescheduling work orders for all production resources, to be able to easily overview the entire production plan, track the progress and efficiently communicate with the shop floor.
The TopTeep solution has made great progress from the initial proof of concept, and it is currently in production and used by many manufacturing companies, where more than 200 production lines are constantly monitored. The service enables users to track factory performance, perform efficient planning, improve communication between management and shop floor, and, most importantly, indicate where improvements are needed in the manufacturing process like reducing scrap quantities, increasing low performance or equipment availability, etc. Although many goals are accomplished, the story is not finished yet and we are still moving on, facing many new challenges.
The greatest value of the KoloTree company is that in one place we could find the entire range of expertise needed for this type of project. By opening discussions for all software product aspects that business domain experts do not recognize, and providing high-quality solutions, the KoloTree team adds high value to the whole project and prevents many problems that would surely occur without their experience and knowledge.
This was a green field project where the KoloTree team has been involved in all aspects, from the requirement gathering and the first design sketches, through planning, development, and maintenance, to the users' support and feedback gathering. As the project evolved from one to another phase, the team faced different kinds of challenges.
The first challenge the team had to face was diving into the manufacturing domain, gathering and formulating the requirements, and creating a plan for the implementation. Throughout a few Event Storming sessions and planning events with the domain experts, the team understood the basics of the targeted manufacturing process, and the plan for the MVP was made.
The biggest challenge for the MVP phase was to efficiently design the system and determine how to gather production data. It was decided that a 3rd party acquisition IoT module, Advantech Wise, will be used so that we can deliver the MVP in a short period. For transferring the information from the production line to the system MQTT protocol proved to be the best choice. Further implementation of the most critical features for monitoring, planning, and statistical analysis, enabled successful verification of the MVP solution at real production sites.
With the second phase, a couple of manufacturing companies recognized TopTeep value, and wanted to install it on-site, and further requirements were introduced. One of the challenges we faced was to efficiently overcome some limitations of the Advantech Wise module to meet some of the new client requirements. For this, a custom device was made that was based on the industrial Raspberry PI module where custom acquisition firmware was developed that met all the expectations. In cooperation with the clients, we found a way to further develop and improve many TopTeep features: visual planning was introduced, a few statistics were improved, many new reports were added, etc.
As more and more companies were joining the TopTeep partnership, the third phase started. There was a need to track more variants of production lines, easier company onboarding, easier installation, performance improvements for tracking more and more production lines, more statistical analysis and the most important to easily support further extension. In order to fulfil those expectations, the solution was redesigned using the Event Modelling approach which provided a way for more efficient upgrades for all the features. Since we reached the limit with current UI libraries for the production planning solution, it had to be redesigned too, where the Bryntum Scheduler Pro component was introduced and customized according to user needs.
The new custom hardware and firmware for production data acquisition was developed as well. It enabled tracking of the different kinds of the productions like plastic extrusion. The most important was that it cut the cost of the installation as it enabled fully wireless connection in the industrial environment.
Also, deployment was significantly improved by introducing Kubernetes and Terraform which enabled system scaling when it is needed and drastically reduced the time for further expansion and improvements.
During all the phases, the entire team learned a lot and successfully realized many ideas. And yet, we still have not dried out with new ideas to improve the project further, and we have many plans to support the product growth in the future.
Industrial manufacturing
Serbia, Novi Sad
10+ members
Cooperation: 2020 – ongoing