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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
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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.
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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!