OREANDA-NEWS. GE Intelligent Platforms (NYSE: GE) today announced the immediate availability of its breakthrough manufacturing execution management software solution, Proficy for Manufacturing Discrete (PfMD). This powerful solution designed specifically for complex discrete manufacturing environments takes manufacturing execution to a new level through complete digitization of paper-based processes.

Manufacturers of complex products in industries such as Aerospace, Energy Equipment and Heavy Machinery, face particular challenges in reducing production cycle times, while maintaining quality and meeting regulatory requirements due to long production cycles. Proficy for Manufacturing Discrete provides digitized standard operating procedures, advanced dispatch capabilities and structured capture of quality data to support real-time decision making and continuous process improvement, especially in complex, engineer-to-order and build-to-order environments.

“PfMD incorporates the best practices of GE’s own world-class manufacturing businesses,” said Don Busiek, General Manager, Manufacturing Software for GE Intelligent Platforms. “It incorporates our learnings in real-world discrete manufacturing environments, as well as our 25 years of MES expertise. In addition, we are seeing amazing results from implementation at GE sites.”

70% reduced warranty investigation time
10% reduced WIP Inventory
20% reduced product cycle times
25% reduced rework and scrap
20% reduced manufacturing costs
PfMD is adaptable to multiple manufacturing environments ranging from the production of long-cycle, complex products engineered to order, to discrete products being configured to order. By digitizing work processes, PfMD enables the entire manufacturing workforce, including operators, production supervisors, manufacturing engineers and quality engineers to produce products faster, more efficiently, and consistently. PfMD has been designed to handle environments where more than 100,000 routes, hundreds of thousands of documents, and tens of thousands of quality forms required to support the products being produced.

Integrated with GE’s Proficy Manufacturing suite for consistency across products, PfMD provides standard connectivity to ERP and PLM systems for rapid deployments. It is modularized to deploy in phases for near-term and long-term benefits and features advanced architecture to integrate with existing plant floor controls and operations.

A key feature of PfMD is its Dispatch capability which enables operations to be dispatched to lines and/or work cells based on the route definitions in the form of jobs to be executed. The queue of jobs associated with a line and/or a work cell is made up of comparable operations from multiple orders. Also, the product’s documentation management capabilities allows production supervisors to manage the documents utilized within the system, including the creation, modification, and revision control of documents, which can be routed through an approval process prior to production. In addition, PfMD provides detailed order scheduling, product management, order execution, route management, labor tracking, WIP management, manufacturing instructions for operations.

Genealogy and Traceability features of PfMD capture a permanent record of as-built product data, including the material/BOMs, along with all quality data and routes/operations. The solution also captures quality data associated with the product and/or process through quality forms and configures the qualifications and/or certification levels of equipment and personnel to ensure the right people and/or equipment are allowed to perform the operations (i.e., execute the jobs).

Digitized information enables true real-time digitized WIP Visibility and Management to reduce cost and improve product manufacturing cycles. PfMD also Streamlines Supply Chain Management by capturing supplier and outsourced operation data.