December - 201919MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSOur HYDRA MES system takes into account the needs of modern manufacturing companies--scalability, flexibility, value for money, and usabilityclient's requirements can be met with the standard MES HYDRA solution or if enhancements are needed. A classical implementation team from MPDV then supports the client during the deployment process. With its 22 modules, HYDRA excels when used in classical manufacturing projects that involve topics such as assessing shop floor status, scheduling, and process value setting and monitoring. Quality assurance together with tracking and tracing of material batches is often a mandatory part of the MES implementation. In addition, human resource aspects of scheduling based on qualifications and the handling of complex shift models in larger factories can be part of a HYDRA implementation. Highlighting one instance, Loelkes talks about MPDV's recent partnership with ALLGAIER, a leading supplier of metal structures to automotive OEMs. The company wanted to gain greater insight into machine efficiencies in order to improve the overall production workflow. ALLGAIER implemented HYDRA to collect and analyze standstill data from their factory machines. After implementation, the shop floor and machine data, along with shop floor scheduling details, were interlinked to facilitate order evaluation and optimization of machine assignment. As a next step, the client extended its application of HYDRA by adding modules such as material and production logistics (MPL), in-production inspection, and process data collection. With HYDRA, tasks like order processing, and machine status and production quantities reporting became automated. "We were able to gain a transparent view of orders and improve our performance in the long term with HYDRA with superior machine data. To date, HYDRA continues to help us define standardized operative KPIs across the group," says Patrick Wolf, IT Manager at ALLGAIER. In its journey, MPDV has grown from a two-person team to a 500-employee medium-size business with 1300 success stories worldwide. For the future, MPDV has a clear vision to create smart factories where the manufacturer can feed big data into MPDV's platform as part of the machine learning eco-system in order to predict production quality, monitor shop floor activity, enable predictive maintenance of equipment, and much more. To that end, MPDV has formed a joint subsidiary called AIMES (Artificial Intelligence for Manufacturing Excellence Solutions) in collaboration with Perfect Pattern, an industrial AI company, to develop and provide software components to bolster artificial intelligence in the realm of manufacturing. MPDV is also ready to launch the second version of its EDGE computing suite to enable better IoT data collection on smart factory floors.
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