MES, OEE and live machine dataMES, OEE and live machine data

Business challenge

The plant knew what it planned and what it shipped, but not what happened in between. Stops were logged from memory at the end of the shift, scrap was counted on paper, and OEE was a monthly spreadsheet nobody fully trusted. The controllers held the real numbers, and nobody was reading them.

Solution

Futera connected the PLCs to SAP through SAP PCo and OPC UA. Machine cycles, states and alarms are read directly from the controllers and matched to the running production order. Operators see the order, the target rate and the live count on a shop-floor screen, and add only what the machine cannot know: the reason for a stop, a quality decision. Reporting follows the way each line works: time ticket confirmations for labor and machine time, time events for start, interruption and finish, quantity-based reporting for batch lines and serial-by-serial reporting where every unit is tracked. Production and quality run as one process. An in-process inspection lot opens from the confirmation, the lab records its results and data collection points in SAP QM, and the batch is released with the results attached. The MES layer consolidates everything and posts confirmations, consumption, batches and serial numbers to SAP while the shift is running. Availability, performance and quality are calculated per machine, shift and order, and every loss carries a reason code and a timestamp.

Results

• Production status and OEE are visible during the shift, not after it
• Confirmations are posted from machine counts instead of end-of-shift paperwork
• Time ticket, time event, quantity and serial reporting on the same screen, per line
• In-process inspection, lab results and data collection close the loop between PP and QM
• Every loss has a machine, a reason and a time, so improvement work starts from data

Technologies