Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the process of industrialization mechanization is first step in automation. Mechanization is step towards to reduce dependence on human muscle power. But lot of work were dependent on human senses and mental capability which often hard to replace in terms of skill level from person to person as well as to maintain consistency in quality. So next step in automation is to reduce dependency on human senses and mental capability wherever the process and quality level is well defined.

Advancement in electrical and electronic sciences and advancement in instrumentation such as barcode, RFID, various sensors such as temperature, pressure, color, light etc gave opportunity to reduce dependence on human senses and mental capability in the industry. To start with electric motor can rotate conveyor belt or electronic & electrical equipments together working with mechanical machine to come up with computer numeric control (CNC) machine tools. Such advancement also lead to gather the data through various instruments like barcode, RFID, sensors etc and convert into digital signal via programmable logic cards (PLC) and send it to Computer for data logging or real time decision making.

Such advancement not only reduces cost and increase productivity but also promises consistent quality of the products manufactured. Today industry is using quality at six sigma level meaning single digit defects per millions of units manufactured. Also industries are looking for providing variety to customer. That means customers get different models depending on their needs and functionalities, different accessories to support their activities, and choices such as colors. In order to provide such things industries either constantly change the set ups and train the operators or use automation tools to automatically change the setup and provide information instantly to operators such that they know what to do at that given moment. Although PLCs and control concept were realized couple of decades back industries still did not availed or used only limited such facilities due various constraints. Either because certain technologies are not fine tuned for an instantaneous action and information presentation or because industries were busy automating (or computerization) of other departments such as accounting, inventory, and purchasing etc by using ERP packages. Hence there is really an information gap and there is a great deal of need to bridge those gaps to support above mentioned automation.

To bridge the gap we need to integrate the ERP application with Manufacturing Execution System (MES). MES is an application which has a basic decision making and setup system to interact with PLCs. Recently certain type of basic MES were either provided by PLC vendors such as Siemens (SCADA) and Allen Bradley (FTTM) or independent vendors to collect or fetch such data from/to PLCs respectively. Once collected such data need to be analyzed and reported to management or take instantaneous decision.

For example a company 'X' may have various models of widgets to be manufactured based on either customers' choice or based on ever changing forecasts. Company 'X' doesn't want to manufacture such models in advance and pile up finish good inventory. Also it cannot have separate assembly line for each such models as these assembly lines are quite expensive investment. Hence setup needs to change and/or assembly components and instructions are to be provided to the operators instantaneously via HMI (human machine interface such as touch screens). To get such instantaneous information, which is already available in Company 'X' Bills of Material (BOM) of ERP application, we need to write software to integrate MES with ERP or directly interact with PLCs and ERP. This could be also used to instantaneous update of inventory as product get manufactured, collect defect statistics, rejection rates, automatically divert defective product for rework, instantaneously notify sales rep to manage customer expectation in case delay in production, assembly line downtime there by calculate capacity utilization to name few.

We at Kalpa recently worked on number of such projects to do a synchronous communication with PLCs, MES and ERP. Please refer our Case Studies for further detail.