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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, production planning, 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. Production planning focuses on the design of the production processes, and this design must involve the necessary intermediate parts, tooling, equipment, and instructions required to realize the detailed product design in a particular 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 in the development of an industry wide Production Planning Initiative for U.S. shipyards. The premise of the ONR LCMS Production Planning Initiative is that if production strategies and instructions can be established in advance of other production activities, there will be a significant improvement in the cost and schedule realization of Naval ship construction, especially for first-of-class vessels. In addition, comprehensive production planning can also improve management visibility and reduce the impact of changes on production. Shipyards will be better able to accommodate the Navy’s need to introduce design changes in response to changes in mission, threat, and technology over the course of a weapon system’s production run while still achieving productivity and cost improvements.
The Agile, Wireless Enabled Workflows for Ship Manufacture and Repair (AWSM) effort for the Office of Naval Research developed tools that enabled shipyards to take advantage of 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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