Industry Trends

329/5000 Zhejiang Yamingwei Printing & Packaging Co., Ltd. was established in 2010. Its main business is the research and development, design and production of pharmaceutical packaging color boxes, and it is constantly exploring on the road of digitalization. In the current fierce market competition, as a practitioner of digital factories, after seeing the advanced innovations abroad, the author has been thinking whether the printing and packaging industry can keep up with the trend of The Times and turn passivity into initiative on the road of digitalization? In this article, the author will share with you the digital management of printing and packaging enterprises.

Management Objective

▼

The management goals of printing and packaging enterprises can be represented by the inverted pyramid shown in Figure 1. At the bottom is cost control ability, and further up, efficiency and quality are required. These are the foundations for enterprises to participate in competition. If these foundations are in place, the enterprise may lead the industry as it moves forward, such as having a good organizational atmosphere and corporate culture, professional employee qualities and a promotion evaluation system for employees, and then to a higher-level good handling of customer relationships. It is precisely because of these management goals of enterprises that they need to think more and go further.

Figure 1 Management objectives of printing and packaging enterprises

The gap between management goals and reality

▼

In reality, there is still a considerable gap between the lofty ideals and the harsh reality for printing and packaging enterprises! The current production situation is that there is no data without assessment, there is data without assessment, the data is not objective and the assessment is not fair.

For instance, how to evaluate efficiency? In the past, people often said that they felt a certain workshop was very good, and based on their impression, they said that a certain captain was particularly efficient because he was working overtime every day. When we delivered the product to the customer, the task was accomplished and the customer did not complain. However, the current situation is not like this. The most frequently heard concept is that there should be online quality traceability. During the production process of products, it is necessary to know the yield rate, pass rate and cost assessment. In the past, printing enterprises could only know whether they had made a profit or suffered a loss by the end of the year. Nowadays, when participating in bidding and tendering, it is necessary to dynamically reflect the enterprise's profitability and cost advantages every month or even every specific day, so as to calmly face the competitive targets.

Data-Driven Management

▼

It is precisely because of these pain points that enterprises need to adopt digitalization. Before the advent of intelligence, the most practical way to enhance management performance and enterprise competitiveness at present is to build digitalization. There are many ways and methods to build digitalization within a factory. First of all, it should start from the workshop, open the black box of the workshop, and use the data such as production capacity and production efficiency inside the workshop to improve production and evaluate personnel.

If there is a complete digital factory module applied to printing and packaging enterprises, it is ERP (Manufacturing Management System). ERP is the first among all digital modules, followed by MES (Manufacturing Execution System), then APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling System), and finally WMS (Intelligent Warehouse Management System). If the enterprise has the ability, it can spend 3 to 5 years developing the digital factory module. The first step now is to get the ERP and MES modules up and running.

The differences between ERP and MES

As is well known, ERP stands for supply chain management. From the perspectives of warehousing, orders, and procurement, what is always seen are some financial data, while some production process data cannot be reflected in the system. At this point, the MES system comes into play. It can describe, analyze, and improve parameters such as the working efficiency, operation trajectory, and equipment structure of the equipment in the factory workshop. It provides operators and managers with tracking of the execution of plans and the current status of all resources (people, equipment, materials, customer demands, etc.), ultimately solving the black box problem in the factory production process and achieving visualization and controllability of the production process.

2. Make a choice based on the actual situation

MES is indeed available and has also been well applied abroad. But we still need to be rational and do it module by module. First, solve the standards and processes with ERP, and then try to implement MES. Of course, it also depends on the situation of the enterprise itself. If it is a workshop that can be seen at a glance, it is not recommended to use MES. If there are more than 10 pieces of equipment and there are day shifts and night shifts, it is recommended to try MES. Start from the most basic data to solve the operation trajectory, working condition efficiency and other issues in the production workshop.

3. Practical application

In the process of production practice, the first issues to be addressed include equipment efficiency, processing time, processing speed, and the transmission efficiency of workshop management. Our company has installed production kanban boards in the production workshop, which can display the processing effect, processing speed, yield rate of each piece of equipment on the same day, as well as the accumulated description data up to the current month. After a period of analysis and problem-solving, the core components in the workshop, namely efficiency and the rate of qualified products, have both been improved.

Production management is a process management. Without a process, there will be no result. Whether it is production management or supply chain management, let the data speak in the process of tracking production. Only with data can there be the possibility of improvement, and only with improvement can there be the possibility of lean management. Everything is aimed at enabling the enterprise to survive better.

Intelligent Thinking

▼

1. Prioritize process-oriented, standardized and automated approaches

If a printing and packaging enterprise is preparing to build a digital factory, it must first do a good job in standardization, process optimization and automation.

2. Focus on a customer-oriented approach

Take the pharmaceutical packaging industry as an example. The changes in recent years have been earth-shaking, and the industry competition is extremely fierce. Customers' demands for low cost and high quality have gradually emerged. Therefore, enterprises need to have a good cost advantage, and this cost advantage must be supported by high efficiency.

3. Address management pain points

Solving the management pain points of enterprises is of great benefit to their future development and the improvement of customer satisfaction.

4. Differentiation

The equipment and employee qualities of different enterprises vary greatly, so it is best not to choose a very standardized management system. Instead, a "standard + customized" system should be selected based on the characteristics of one's own enterprise.

Author: Sun Qingsong, Zhejiang Yamingwei Printing & Packaging Co., LTD