!w" DECEMBER 2012 WELCOME TO PROPLANNER 8.0 DR DAVE SLY, PRESIDENT, PROPLANNER, INC Greetings and welcome to the 8th installment of Proplanner, process engineering and management software for manufacturers who assemble products. Our 8th incarnation is such a major release for us, we thought it would be helpful to dedicate an entire newsletter on how these enhancements can be utilized by our clients. We want to greatly thank all of the clients that helped define and evaluate these market-leading capabilities. Several key features of this release have been in development for nearly five man years over the past six months. The new mBOM tree provides a major improvement in BOM navigation performance while also providing unparalleled viewing of user-selected item attributes. In this issue Latest News: Proplanner 8.0 Client Spotlight: Stewart & Stevenson Meet the Team: Bando Proplanner Asia Update Important Improvements Employee News From our Clients: ElectroMotive Diesels The new Process Import capability finally makes it possible for companies to import their own multi-level process data with Y#$% G$i'( t) *+( la,es- Pr#.l/0 !% S1w/2( Upda,e" complicated Model and Option rules. Previously, these massive data imports needed to be provided by our Engineering Services team, but now companies have all of the tools use by our engineers (and even a few more) within the standard Assembly Planner application. Role Based Application security now allows our clients the ability to restrict access to any of the Proplanner Authoring modules, such as Time Estimation, Line Balancing, Work Instructions and MCO processing. The new Yamazumi chart’s edit and view capabilities within Line Balancing have been greatly enhanced, and additional charting options (i.e. Worst Possible Model Time) have been added. Most importantly are the new AND/OR rules to enhance sophisticated Model/Option configurations. Our Time Estimation and line balancing modules now support the OCRA and MURI ergonomics assessment techniques. Additional ergonomic reports have been added to the Process Routing module. (Continued on page 3) Copyright 2012 Proplanner PROPLANNER, INC 2321 North Loop Drive Suite 104 Ames, Iowa 50010 515.296.9914 info@proplanner.com www.proplanner.com TRANSFORMING ENGINEERING AT STEWART & STEVENSON Christina Demuth, Sales Engineer Christina@Proplanner.com Stewart & Stevenson (S&S), one of the world’s largest manufacturers of specialized equipment for the oil and gas industries, has implemented Proplanner’s process engineering solutions at their headquarters in Houston, Texas to streamline management of their manufacturing bills of material (mBOMs) and to create unit-specific, interactive work instructions. S&S faced challenges with frequent shortages and surpluses of various components on the manufacturing floor, which led to lost production time as well as wasted engineering and planning efforts. These problems stemmed from the difficulty of manually maintaining accurate mBOMs, whose data the purchasing department uses to order parts and the inventory department uses to deliver parts. Mark Siemsglusz, a member of the newly formed Manufacturing Engineering Group (MEG) at S&S, first sought out Proplanner “with the primary focus of taking our mBOM accuracy from a 3D level to a 6D level.” With the help of Proplanner’s engineering and development staff, the MEG has increased the accuracy of their mBOMs to 6D levels and has developed a “more efficient process, from both an engineering and production perspective,” shared Brian Sharp, an MEG member. Today, when a change is made to the design of a product, engineers import the new corresponding engineering bills of material (eBOMs) and engineering change order data directly from their Autodesk Vault Manufacturing system into Assembly Planner. The engineers see a side-by-side comparison of the new eBOM to the current mBOM, and quickly apply necessary changes to the mBOM. The mBOM is then exported to S&S’s JD Edwards ERP system so the rest of the organization has the up-to-date information they need. The S&S manufacturing engineering team also recognized a need to improve communication with the manufacturing floor. The team now authors work instructions in Assembly Planner and publishes unitspecific electronic instructions to Proplanner’s web-based Shop Floor Viewer. From iPads and mobile work stations, mechanics access current task descriptions, part IDs and quantities, and tooling lists for each product configuration they work on. Shop floor mechanics can hyperlink directly to drawing and 3D animation files created in Autodesk Inventor Publisher for more details and visual guidance on performing each task. Waldo Escobedo, another MEG member, adds that mechanics can also use a “hot button feature that allows real-time reporting of quality issues, shortages, or BOM inaccuracies to the respective organizations.” S&S has emphasized the value of the Shop Floor Viewer work instructions for training purposes and for improving the overall communication, efficiency, quality, and profitability achieved by their organization. “The results so far have been great,” said Siemsglusz. “We know that manufacturing processes must be planned, designed, modeled, and ramped up to compete, and Proplanner has improved our ability to do so.” WELCOME TO PROPLANNER 8.0 (Continued from page 1) A new Image Editing and Markup capability has been added to support within-application work instruction publishing. Of course, users can still import content from any Microsoft application such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. M3e*+( ,e/4 Sequence Planning Charts are now available for view and query by workers on the floor in our Shop Floor Viewer. A complete update of our User Interface customization capabilities now allows users to alter their spreadsheet views in the same way as is done in the new MS Office applications. Abhishek Bandyopadhyay Bando@proplanner.com Nickname: Bando Title: Manager of Engineering Services Education: MSIE, 2002 B.E 1999 Years at Proplanner: 10 Family: Wife Ritushree and daughter age 2. Hobbies and Interests: Cricket and Badminton PROPLANNER ASIA NEWS Major Clients: CNH, Oshkosh Trucks, Fisher Controls, Turk Traktors PACIFIC RIM TREND: MAKING THE SWITCH FROM EXCEL TO PROPLANNER PRODUCTS Robin Owens Robin@proplanner.com Proplanner Asia has established a strong presence in universities over the past two years, and has built on relationships with Professors and students to deploy the software to industry, specifically to electronics manufacturing companies. Recent customers include Nokia China, Flextronics Malaysia, Seagate Thailand, Analog Philippines, and the Philippine government (National Wages and Productivity Commission). Much manufacturing has migrated from the USA and Europe to the Asia region, and process and industrial engineers in Asia often struggle to combine traditional techniques with Filipino IE Students at Holy Angel modern technology to improve their operations. Manual University use Flow Planner to reduce the methods and common tools such as MS Excel are often used material flow distance traveled by 54% to perform functions like time & motion studies, assembly line balancing, process planning, and work instructions. Facility layout work is typically performed using only the AutoCAD drafting tool, without taking industrial engineering analysis into consideration. Proplanner Asia recognizes the importance of educating our clients about how technology can improve the use of human, equipment, and material resources. We are very excited about our progress and the results our clients have achieved, and encourage our customers to share their knowledge about Proplanner’s value to their operations in Asia. IMPORTANT ASSEMBLY PLANNER IMPROVEMENTS FEATURE Automatic copying EBOM to MBOM Add data filter to SOS SOP report Mass add operations to routings BOM tree control Role based security DETAILS When assigning ECO, there is a check box “Copy EBOM to MBOM”. By checking this box, the existing MBOM data will be wiped out, and the EBOM data will be copied over to the MBOM side. Users don’t need to make the changes to MBOM manually. This functionality is designed for new product, which does not have an MBOM yet Before running the SOS/SOP report, user can check a date filter box and choose the cut-in date. In this way, only processes and consumptions which are active as of the date will be considered. In Data Mgmt -> Import Data, choose “Process Structure” from the “Select Import Type” drop down menu.Then user can either import external file or manually type in data in the sheet. The key fields for the import are RoutingID, Routing Type, and OpSeqNo. a. User is now able to edit the data in the sheet directly, instead of right click and do a mass edit view; b. BOM tree should now only collapse when the user switches from one item to another; c. Double click will no longer take you to the clicked item, that is now via the right click “Open Item” context menu; d. Customize View should correctly refresh both the EBOM and MBOM trees; e. User can now edit the Effectivity Dates from the drop down menu. USER BENEFITS Proplanner automatically creates the manfacturing bill of material for items that are coming in for the first time from the product design system. The complete process structrure can now be imported. Proplanner allowes users to import routings, operations, activities, time standards, work steps, resource mappings and part consumption. The complete process structrure can now be imported. Proplanner allowes users to import routings, operations, activities, time standards, work steps, resource mappings and part consumption. In-place editing of the bill of material data is now allowed. The user need not go to a mass edit screen to edit data. The new BOM control allows editing of both BOM and item properties. The BOM tree does not collapse while visiting other modules, it remains expanded. Proplanner now has a roles module which allows System Administrators to create user-defined roles. By mapping a role to a user the Administrator can control all the screens that the user can visit. Additionally, the Administrator can also control the functions allowed by the user in each of the screens/ modules For example, the Product Control Group will now have access to only to component-related data, while the Manufacturing Engineers will be able to see product data but not edit. IMPORTANT ASSEMBLY PLANNER IMPROVEMENTS FEATURE Proof Mode Report DETAILS User can now generate the report before implementing the MCO USER BENEFITS This report allows the user to check progress on an engineering change that has been processed through Proplanner. The report compares the Bill of Material at a certain point in time to the last exported Bill. New Control in Plant Module a. enable user to search station by ID, Description, or Line; b. enable user to sort and filter in each column; c. enable user to edit resource mapping for each station User can now break down the normal time into three different categories User may search station by ID, Description, or Line; b. enable user to sort and filter in each column; c. enable user to edit resource mapping for each station Users can now add MUDA details to every time element. This feature enables every time element to have value-added, non-value-added and semi-value-added categories. The values in these categories are rolled up and reflected on the activity. Add VA, NVA and SVA columns in MOST sheet “We're using Proplanner at EMD to manage our work instructions and deploy them visually on the work floor. Proplanner has helped us organize our data and have a consistent way of managing our operations information. We're excited to work on extending this effort into improving time standards and subsequently line balancing to improve our performance. Proplanner is a key enabler in our Lean journey here at EMD.” PROPLANNER IS GROWING! Steve Nolan Director of Operational Excellence ElectroMotive Diesels Mike Cobler Sales Engineer Jaryd Rowley Testing Intern Josh Otten Testing Intern Photo courtesy of Steve Nolan WORK WITH THE LATEST VERSION OF PROPLANNER PRODUCTS RECENT UPDATES Version 2.8 of Work Place Planner Version 2.9 of Flow Planner Meet our newest employees!