Nissan's intelligent plant.When Nissan built its Canton, Mississippi Canton is a city in Madison County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 12,911 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Madison CountyGR6, and situated in the northern part of the metropolitan area surrounding the state capital, Jackson. manufacturing plant, with a plan to launch six new models in 14 months, it needed as much intelligence on the manufacturing floor as possible. So the automaker installed a Production Management Control System (PCMS PCMS Purchase Card Management System PCMS Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (Fort Carson, CO) PCMS Project Configuration Management System PCMS Patient Care Management System PCMS Passive Countermeasure System ) based on GE Fanuc Automation's (www.gefanuc.com; Charlottesville, VA) CIMPLICITY software. The system coordinates over 1.2 million input/output points in the plant and transfers all of the data necessary to move vehicles through the entire manufacturing process from welding welding, process for joining separate pieces of metal in a continuous metallic bond. Cold-pressure welding is accomplished by the application of high pressure at room temperature; forge welding (forging) is done by means of hammering, with the addition of heat. , to painting, to final assembly. During the process it tracks and routes vehicles, delivering information to over 150 shop floor devices, and notifies suppliers when to ship their parts so they arrive just-in-time and in sequence. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Rich Breuning, automotive marketing manager for GE Fanuc Automation GE Fanuc Automation, Inc, a joint venture between FANUC LTD. of Japan and General Electric, is a business unit of GE Enterprise Solutions[2]. GE Fanuc is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. , CIMPLICITY enables Nissan to have a more flexible manufacturing environment that focuses on continuous improvement. "The team can constantly change routing rules, refining processes to restore sequence and minimize costs," he explains. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Since implementing the system, Nissan reports it has decreased maintenance training time by 70%; reduced engineering training time by more than half; reduced scrap; maintained quality and uptime levels approaching Six Sigma Not to be confused with Sigma 6. Six Sigma is a set of practices originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects.[1] A defect is defined as nonconformity of a product or service to its specifications. , and cut integration costs for additional projects by 80%, all with an engineering team estimated to be only 25% the size of its competitors. The system utilizes a real-time web-based interface that allows for changing factors like build sequence and color and trim type from remote locations. To provide for faster startups in the case of system failure, point-in-time snapshots of the entire system are automatically performed at regular intervals during daily production. And components on the plant floor are programmed to not only collect detailed production data, but to provide automated error-proofing that ensures the correct parts are chosen for each vehicle. When a unit falls out of sequence due to repair the system automatically modifies the production schedule to avoid disruption and downtime The time during which a computer is not functioning due to hardware, operating system or application program failure. . |
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