So much on the line

It takes 1,700 wireless terminals, advanced manufacturing software, and ERP to manage real-time order execution for Lucent.

By -- Modern Materials Handling, 2/1/2001

Communications is what it's all about for Lucent. That's true whether you're talking about the thousands of telecommunications products it makes at its 1.5 million sq ft Omaha Works or how it goes about making them.

Unfortunately, there was not a clear connection about what needed to be produced, what could be produced, or how well anything was being produced. Manual data capture systems that tracked an order's life cycle from raw materials to finished product provided only historical data. Real-time information is what Lucent needed. And that called for some major changes.

Combining ERP, MES, RFDC

The first step was to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Beyond managing orders, the ERP software develops the production plans for all of the many facilities in Omaha. But it couldn't do that without real-time information about how production was proceeding at the Works' various buildings.

That's where a home-grown manufacturing execution system called Max comes in. It extends the ERP's production planning module onto the shop floor, and lets managers direct and track order production on an operation-by-operation basis. A direct interface with the ERP system keeps data moving in real time.

"We needed to close the loop by providing the operation and order confirmations back to the ERP system," says David Buddenhagen, distinguished member of Lucent's technical staff. "This allows the ERP to update its plan on a daily basis and to provide a new one. Every day is a fresh start."

The final link in this new production management system is a vast radio frequency data communication (RFDC) network. This system (LXE, 770-447-4224, www.lxe.com ) allows nearly 1,700 wireless computers to exchange real-time inventory data with an Ethernet local area network (LAN). Three hundred of those terminals are handheld and the other 1.400 are vehicle mounted.

"We now have the ability to put in the hands of an operator a terminal from which they can receive instructions from the system to scan materials and complete orders and communicate exactly what they are doing without ever leaving their workstations," says Terry Fuller, technical manager.

What the system does

Planning and execution of Omaha's build schedule is now much more efficient than before the new systems. As a result, cycle times have been reduced. Furthermore, large buffer stocks of inventory are no longer required to meet finished goods demand from the regional baby Bells and other telecommunications companies. The systems also provide production data that can be compared to established metrics to assess manufacturing productivity on a day to day basis.

But taking time and cost out of the process is only part of the story. Buddenhagen says there were two other interrelated business requirements of the new systems. Lucent wanted to be able to create a material genealogy for whatever it produced. The company also wanted to identify early any process problems that could cause finished goods quality problems.

The real-time capabilities of the systems make both goals achievable.

To track material genealogy, workers use the wireless computers to record operation data including materials consumed and quantities. The computers also record how much of what was produced is good product, how much requires rework, and whether or not there is any scrap.

This information is sent by radio frequency at the high rate of 11 megabits/sec to the Max system. The RFDC system complies with the 802.11 standard for interoperability of wireless computers. Between 500 and 1,000 materials transactions an hour are transmitted to the Max system's NT servers.

As a final step, Max updates the ERP system, letting it know exactly what is (or isn't) happening on the shop floor. This ensures that future production plans made by the ERP system are made with live data, allowing it to make adjustments as needed to fill orders.

When something goes awry in the production process, the real-time nature of the new systems alerts managers to problems before they get out of hand and are even tougher to fix. The previous manual systems made it tough to catch production problems early or even determine why a problem occurred later. "We were blindly attacking unknown problems," says Buddenhagen.

Now, Omaha has a head start on most problems and can pre-empt many of them. The key is being able to correlate production data collected on the shop floor with test data that shows a performance problem. Using the material genealogy, related products that may suffer from the same quality problems can be identified before those parts ship. With links between all segments of the real-time system, the production plan can be modified before customer service suffers.

The system works even in those rare instances when a problem part ships and the customer discovers trouble. At that point, Lucent can go back and make the necessary adjustments before shipping any more product with the same problems.

In the end, the Omaha Works has far better control over not only what it does produce but also over what it plans to produce tomorrow.