The term ‘Platforms,’ most commonly used in manufacturing, refers to a process whereby sets of components or assemblies can be put together in a multitude of different ways to create a multitude of different products..
And, of course, if people are fully involved in generating solutions, they're more likely to adopt them..Visual information is vital in communicating complex issues.
A generally accepted principle in systems thinking is that diagrams are required to convey complex issues in a way that text generally can't.. We also use modeling and data visualisation, to ensure that decisions are based on facts and data, rather than opinion and hunches.Transparency of data sources and decision-making is important, because it gives people confidence in the analysis and the proposed solutions..Knowledge capture allows reuse of learning from project to project, promotes standardisation, and allows us to trace decisions through the life cycle of a project.. We will see how Chip Thinking® plays an important role in applying these principles.. What are Chips?.
Chips are the smallest meaningful part of the processes that make up a supply chain.Chips are sets of interacting or interdependent components, plus all the data that goes into them.
They bring to life all data and stakeholder knowledge in one place, using a common language, so that everyone can understand every aspect.. Chips become the building blocks for our design.
They also become the building blocks for conversations between the people dealing with business strategy and those people dealing with design and implementation of the pharmaceutical engineering project.. We start off with the analysis of the business problem and then generate design elements.The factory takes square hollow section steel and plate steel as raw materials and fabricates different types of painted trusses.
Using expected market demand as well as the ongoing truss system designs, a process flow for fabrication was developed with initial layouts for arrangement and quantities of equipment.Most of this process is to be automated with some manual intervention for transport, quality assurance and painting; processes where automated stations are unnecessary or significantly expensive against provided benefit.. To provide a better understanding of the system, we built a time-based discrete event model to represent the process and provide key outputs for various sets of input parameters.
This allows the designers and stakeholders at an initial planning stage to see, digitally, how their assets could perform during production and provide feedback during the project at the earliest opportunities where large changes can be made to maximise value.. For the purposes of this project, operations upstream of raw material addition, and operations downstream of the final truss painting, were excluded from the simulation.The remaining process steps represented the core fabrication steps to transform raw materials into finished trusses, in addition to some of the largest investments in capital and automation and, therefore, the areas of highest interest.. We built the model itself in AnyLogic, primarily with the process modelling and material handling libraries.