top of page
Navigating the Factory of the Future
mapd_thinkpad_front.png

With              every employee has understandable information to make informed decisions and to track down problems.

As an integrated control hub mapd allows to observe deviations and errors, drill down into problems, and implement solutions.

Observe deviations and errors in seconds.
 

"Today I spend two or three hours gathering and compiling data"

Liz, Supply Chain Manager

Accessing data is time consuming and produces communication overhead because

Expert Knowledge is required

Outliers are hard to find without context information

Data inconsistencies prevent an overview

Liz.png
Liz is a supply chain manager at the plasma factory in
Covington, USA. She aligns the production to global and local
network teams and oversees the status of supply chain.

Liz Taylor

Liz's goals are

Observe

eye_white.png

Investigate

luipe_white.png

Execute

adjust_white.png

Observe

eye_white.png
observe.gif

mapd gives a comprehensive overview over the status of the factory. This includes important KPIs and the status of the product.

Errors and delays are highlighted visually, so that they are easy to find.

Liz can explore the status using a hierarchical structure, making it easy to keep the overview about the current situation and where errors are located.

Status information is collected through communication

Bildschirmfoto_2021-05-22_um_00.13.18-re
Identified Pain

Find deviations from the plan

Need

Investigate

luipe_white.png

mapd can automatically detect and highlight delays and show errors in the production. An automatic assessment of the errors shows work orders that are affected, so that the impact can be analyzed.

Liz can select the error and analyze the impact. The "Impacted Lots" tab shows which products are affected and might need to be replanned.

Bildschirmfoto_2021-05-22_um_00.13.18-re
Identified Pain
Need

Devise mitigation Strategies

Impact predictions are manually created

investigate.gif

Execute

adjust_white.png
execute.gif

mapd allows adjustments of the plan in context. By integrating different systems, it is able to show related work orders to the happening delay, and propose plan readjustments.

Liz is able to make a decision based on context information. She can share the information easily to other stakeholders by referencing the information in mapd.

Bildschirmfoto_2021-05-22_um_00.13.18-re
Identified Pain
Need

Implement and communicate decisions

Without context changes are hard to communicate

Hierarchy View
hierarchical.gif

mapd shows the factory as a hierarchical substructure, simplifying navigation and tracking down problems.

UI Elements

trends.png
Color Coding

mapd uses colors to highlight trends, which helps to focus on the critical values while having all information at hand.

gantt_reshuffling.gif
Dependency Visualization

Interactive Gantt charts allow seeing dependencies between work orders at a glance and make rearranging easy.

Technology

The magic inside mapd:
Collecting data from different IT-Systems has never been that easy

mapd compiles information from different IT-systems in the factory to a digital representation. This enables to analyze not only singular data points, but information in context.

Our technology stack

technology_stack.png
technology_stack.png
Frontend

For the frontend we created a typed React app using Bootstrap and Semantic UI for styling and some helper libraries, including for example lodash.

Backend

In the Backend, we used python in combination with the lightweight micro-framework flask to serve the requests. We experimented with different techniques to store the manufacturing logs, first with NoSQL databases, but chose the SQL database SQLite finally. It provided more effortless possibilities to do analytic queries.

technology_stack.png
Deployment

It was essential for us to deploy updates to our prototype for user testing quickly. We, therefore, chose a semi-automated deployment strategy using Amazon S3 web storage and an EC2 instance for the Backend.

Navigating the factory of the future

bottom of page