Manufacturer Automates AutoCAD BOMs

Osmonics, based in Minnetonka, Minn., pioneered the commercial development of reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration technologies. The company provides a breadth of products and services for industrial processing and power, potable water, health care, food and electronic manufacturing markets. The mission of Osmonics is to help industrial, institutional and commercial customers worldwide ensure fluid purity in their products and processes. They have steadily expanded their ability to manufacture membranes, products and equipment to meet any fluid purification, separation or handling requirement. The company maintains manufacturing locations throughout the U.S.

One of the biggest internal challenges Osmonics faced was how to manage and leverage the volume of information associated with the creation of bill of materials (BOMs). The main goal the company set for itself was to improve enterprise productivity by eliminating redundancy and manual generation of bill of materials in the design department. Says Ed Enquist, engineering manager, "Our CAD group was manually counting thousands of pieces of purchased and fabricated parts, verifying part numbers, and reworking them into a report. Double entry of part data was common, therefore we spent a lot of time verifying our MRP and CAD databases." To automate the creation of bill of materials, Enquist implemented BOMLink software (previously AimaBOM) from AimaSoft Inc., San Rafael, Calif.

Lisa Burmeister, drafting/documentation supervisor at Osmonics, says, "Before implementing BOMLink, our AutoCAD users had no access to an online catalog to choose parts to incorporate in their design. BOMLink has automated this process using point-and-click operations. Now we use BOMLink in every drawing that needs a bill, to generate BOMs, or even combine parts from multiple drawing files to create composite multilevel bill of materials. Per custom assembly, it used to take us four days to manually complete the process, but now we can produce in 30 minutes."

The company's return on investment was realized within three months after implementation. Burmeister says, "We can now easily calculate the exact quantity of each part in the drawing. We can change the drawing and update the bill simply by choosing the update button."

In addition to automatically creating bill of materials, BOMLink also makes the design drawings intelligent by connecting graphical parts or entities inside AutoCAD to a single central repository — Microsoft Access database.

An important factor for Osmonics is that no additional hardware or environment settings were required for BOMLink. Using a navigating toolbar, as usual, every designer just plugs and places parts in AutoCAD. The drafter then inserts the 3-D parts into the assembly, and assigns the part number in BOMLink. This process is further automated by Osmonics to assign part numbers automatically upon insertion with BOMLink's API calls. Any changes made in the drawings are automatically reflected in the common database. Likewise, any changes in the database are reflected in the drawing bill of materials.

Once a bill of materials is generated, without reworking the drawing or data, the engineering department can synchronize electronically with other downstream applications that need the data. The net results are increased productivity and shorter product development cycles. Additional benefits of integrating MRP with CAD include improved inventory control, reduced time to market, and better management of changes in the engineering process.

Ace Metal Crafts Co., Franklin Park, Ill., is a stainless steel fabricator of customized parts. When the company's growth required it to move from a manual, home-grown system to an automated business solution, Ace Metal Crafts turned to Symix for assistance. As a result, the company has succeeded in improving on-time deliveries as well as increasing productivity and revenue.

Ace Metal Crafts serves the food processing and packaging industry as well as several other industries. Founded in 1960, Ace Metal Crafts manufactures hoppers for hamburger patty machines and cookie machines, fluid bed dryers for the pharmaceutical industry, and many other parts. This privately held company has 50 employees.

"From a financial perspective, when we were on the manual system, it took us three weeks to close the month's books," said Ken McGahan, director of MIS. "Now we close them in less than one day."

In 1983, the shop floor manager was the only individual who had information on scheduling orders and routings. Ace Metal Crafts established a manual paper system to keep track of schedules and customer changes at first. Eventually, the company moved to a home-grown computer system that handled job costing, job tracking and inventory control. But as the company grew, it became more difficult to manage the additional production requirements with this system.

By the late 1980s, the company knew it needed a more sophisticated system that could handle its scheduling requirements. At that time, Ace Metal Crafts reviewed about six different software packages.

SYMIX helped Ace Metal Crafts with its immediate need for a scheduling system and armed the company with the tools to look at costing differently, which immediately improved its bottom line. Utilizing an integrated system means Ace Metal Crafts completes its data collection right on the shop floor.

Improvement in productivity and cost reductions have been apparent at Ace Metal Crafts. The company has improved its on-time deliveries from 25 percent to a sustained high of 80 percent in four months. On-time deliveries are still on the rise.

Through the software's costing features, Ace Metal Crafts improved its bottom line immediately — revenue has increased by 20 percent annually. The company has access to accurate data at any time and can make price adjustments as needed. The system allows Ace Metal Crafts to regularly evaluate what's happening on the shop floor.

The company is preparing itself for ISO 9002 certification in the future, and the bill of materials feature in SYMIX will help them meet key quality requirements easily.

As the clock ticks toward the Year 2000, a similar ticking sound can be heard throughout the land — the ticking of keyboard entry as tens of thousands of programmers race to solve the "Y2K Problem."

The first step in dealing with Y2K is to recognize there is a problem and analyze where it impacts the organization. Because of the companywide nature of computer systems, all functional areas will be challenged by Y2K. Accounting, sales, design, engineering, manufacturing, distribution, planning, order processing and purchasing all must be involved with the review of systems. With a fixed deadline — Dec. 31, 1999, in this case — there is scant time to form endless committees and discuss options in depth. Collecting the best talent available — those who know the company's processes, methods and systems best — augmented by outside expertise will move the solution along more rapidly.

Remember, it's not just old programs that are vulnerable. Even a system implemented in the past decade can have the "Millennium Bomb" ticking away in its date code fields. Internet Web sites abound with Y2K complaints and fixes for current systems. Giants in the industry assure their customers that all is well while working feverishly to make it so. Vendors with shaky products announce upgrades and enhancements far in advance of release to head off customer stampedes to their competitors.

While the majority of systems vendors offer Y2K patches and repairs at no or very low cost to customers using their affected software, a few companies use this as a rationale to drive future sales. They force their users to buy the upgrade that fixes the Y2K problem but don't make any interim or retrofit fixes available. Even in the highly competitive market we have today, some companies are dominant enough to get away with this approach. The thought is, if you use their database or applications, are you prepared to throw away years of building and tweaking to implement a competitor's Y2K compliant replacement? Obviously, these companies don't think so.

While large companies throw task force-sized teams at determining the risks of Y2K, mid-sized manufacturers like South Carolina's T&S Brass and Bronze are caught in a bind. The company does as much as it can internally with limited resources, and turns to outside consultants for extra help.

In Traveler's Rest, S.C., T&S Brass manufactures plumbing supplies for the food service industry and has about $38 million in annual revenue. According to Tim Watts, a project leader at T&S, "The Y2K issue was coming into focus gradually until a major customer, McDonald's, sent us a letter asking if we were Year 2000 compliant. That focused us on the issue. Several discussions were held at the executive management level and a plan was formulated. A five-person committee was created to assess the problem and it was decided that this would be a good opportunity to evaluate all our systems and their role in the company's future. The committee brought in Ernest & Young to perform the system review."

Over a period of five months, the committee and the consultants worked to define what systems T&S had and what it needed. The result showed the existing manufacturing system had significant shortcomings and should be replaced. "In the end," Watts recalls, "our selection criteria revolved around the fit of the software to our way of doing business, the vendor's position in the market, Year 2000 compliance and, of course, cost." The vendor of the current system was called in along with others to make a presentation, including what was being done to prevent "meltdown" in 2000. The winner of the evaluation was DataFlo, an integrated enterprise resource planning system from DataWorks, San Diego, Calif.

In discussing how DataFlo handles the Y2K problem, T&S learned that dates are assigned a unique number in the database so that the number of spaces in the date field are immaterial. This has been the case since the product's introduction. For example, in DataFlo, Aug. 1, 1997, would be represented by the number 10806. You can enter the date in the internal format (a number) or in the common external format (date sequence). Either way, the database stores the date as a number and displays it as a human readable date. In addition, you can change the external format to whatever you want.

DataFlo also accommodates the Leap Year factor that will damage some otherwise Y2K compliant systems. Everyone remembers that years divisible by four are Leap Years, where February has an extra day to bring the calendar in line with the solar year. Generally, Century Years are not Leap Years. However, to complicate things, every fourth century the "Leap Year Rule" takes effect. Some software will not "see" Feb. 29, 2000, because it's been so long since the last Century Leap Year some programmers forgot about it. One more thing to watch for.

Home entertainment company Pindoff Record Sales Ltd. has revamped its distribution center operation and made some records of its own in shipping to its 110 Music World stores, large retailers and small independent stores.

The Canadian company has moved from a manual inventory tracking and order picking system to a warehouse management system (WMS) supported by a radio frequency data communications system. With the system, order picking accuracy has climbed to 99.96 percent. The number of orders handled per man-hour has increased, and per unit handling costs have dropped 16 percent. Pindoff is also ready for the future. More and more large retailers are requiring their vendor partners to supply carton content level advance ship notices via electronic data interchange (EDI). With the WMS and real-time communications systems, the company is prepared for EDI requests.

Prior to the WMS implementation, after initial order entry all functions at the main distribution center were done manually for more than 23,000 stockkeeping units (SKUs). According to operations manager Jeff Masters, "Each order was filled by an employee walking through the warehouse with a packing slip and picking the items. Obviously, when you have so many line items to locate, you're going to have errors. Items that could not be found would have to be back-ordered."

Masters wanted an automation system for the warehouse and distribution center that could be flexible enough to satisfy the quick turnaround times required of media products. "A CD can be hot this week, and two weeks from now sales can drop off," he says. "Or, we'll receive a release on Thursday that has a retail display date of the following Monday. We have to be able to expedite the product very quickly to reach our customers on time."

In the fall of 1994, Applications Solutions Inc., a Toronto systems integrator, recommended Norand radio frequency data communications terminals and controllers.

Following a six-month design and planning stage, the system went live in July 1995, just prior to Pindoff's busiest season. The company has eliminated the manual sorting and confirmation of packing slips, as well as the double-check of picked orders. It has achieved both the improved warehouse space allocation and inventory accuracy it desired. When the receiving department scans in a product as it comes in the door, the system automatically assigns it to be stored in the same location as an identical product already in the warehouse. If the item is out of stock or that location is full, it assigns a new location. The warehouse management system manages the inventory on a first-in, first-out basis.

Pickers receive orders on the Norand terminals, along with directions to the product storage location. Using the scanners, pickers confirm the location by scanning a bar coded location label, then scanning the product bar code. This confirms it is the correct product and removes it from inventory. Quantities are entered by the picker on the terminal's 10-key keypad. The information is wirelessly transmitted in real time to the AS/400 via the spread spectrum network.

"Now, as products are received, they're tracked. As they're picked, they're tracked. We know all the locations of the products, and we know how many units are in those locations at any given moment," says Masters. "Before, our initial order picking accuracy was about 96 percent. With the additional manual double check of each order, that improved to 99 percent. Now, our initial picking accuracy is 99.96 percent, without the double check.

Copyright © 2020 by APICS — The Educational Society for Resource Management. All rights reserved.

Web Site © Copyright 2020 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved.


Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
2555 Cumberland Parkway, Suite 299, Atlanta, GA 30339 USA
Phone: +44 23 8110 3411 | br> E-mail:
Web: www.lionheartpub.com


Web Design by Premier Web Designs
E-mail: [email protected]