Paperless manufacturing in mechanical engineering
Digitialization of Assembly and Parts Production with SAP ME
Goals
Bühler AG, the global market leader for food production machinery from Switzerland, has chosen concircle as its strategic partner for the development of a global MES (Manufacturing Execution System) template. In addition to the core process “order processing” with a strong engineering integration, processes in the areas of planning, quality assurance, and maintenance, both in the area of assembly as well as in parts manufacturing, will be digitalized with the help of SAP ME.
Solution
The modernization of the processes was carried out on the basis of the following solutions.
- SAP ME (Manufacturing Execution)
- conLABOR (SAP ME Add-On for time of performance calculation)
- SAP ERP Standard (MM, PP, PM, QM)
- SAP UI5
- SAP FSM (Field Service Management)
- conOS (Proof of Application)
Challenge
For Bühler AG this was the first large template project where two regions (Europe & China) worked together on the solution. There should not be one big go-live, but each project phase should go live in all streams so that verification by the workers can take place in the production system at selected lines. By applying agile project management based on the Scrum methodology and optimal composition of the project team of many experienced experts, both on the concircle and Bühler side, the first sprint incl. go-live in two plants could be implemented with the highest quality in a record time of three and a half months.
Benefits
With this project, Bühler AG took a decisive step towards 100% paperless production. By using SAP ME and the concircle conLABOR package, it was possible to achieve holistic traceability in production in addition to automated order execution and work preparation. In addition, digital access to all technical documents was implemented and the possibility was created to determine the current status of a customer order transparently and precisely at any time on an intelligent dashboard. The SAP ME based solution from concircle makes a significant contribution to increasing transparency, efficiency, and agility of the Bühler production system. Thanks to the measures taken, a great leap in the overall implementation of the global MES template was achieved.
