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Innovative Production Management Systems
The effective management of production systems involves understanding the characteristics of the myriad production systems involved, identifying the different aspects of the system processes and their dynamics, determining the potential of the various tools used for analytics and then implementing the best choice, and developing the ability to determine and react to dynamically changing situations while maintaining a high level of productivity.
Successful production management must also involve procurement management, inventory management, production planning, and systems integration. The absence of effective inventory management can greatly impact the availability of required parts or commodities, which can have a negative impact on productivity. The focus of production planning is on the design of the production processes. This design must involve the intermediate parts, tooling, equipment, and instructions necessary to realize the product design in the production environment. Systems integration--the harmonizing of processes, information, and systems in order to integrate design, development, production, supply chain, and maintenance--allows for optimized production and minimized downtime.
KBSI has successfully applied these principles in numerous production management initiatives. KBSI is working in conjunction with the Louisiana Center for Manufacturing Sciences (LCMS) to support the Office Of Naval Research's goal of developing an industry wide Production Planning Initiative for U.S. shipyards. The Agile, Wireless Enabled Workflows for Ship Manufacture and Repair (AWSM) effort, funded by the Office of Naval Research, developed tools that enabled shipyards to leverage pervasive computing and ubiquitous information flow to optimally deliver information to every user, work crew, and process. The focus of the AWSM effort was to completely redesign processes using a new paradigm--utilizing the flexibility and connectivity of PDA, Tablet PC, and wireless technologies--in which the workload is constantly adjusted to achieve peak performance.
KBSI's commercial WorkSim® software is a knowledge based scheduling system that captures all relevant workload data including task precedence constraints, task priorities, task durations, resource availability schedules, etc. WorkSim®, using this data, generates an optimal schedule of selected workloads.
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