GreyconMill

Introduction

GreyconMill is a new-generation, industry-specific Manufacturing Execution System. The system allows a Paper or Plastic Film company to control and monitor operations in the plant with a state-of-the-art user interface and is fully integrated to the Greycon Suite of Advanced Planning and Scheduling products: opt-Studio, S-Plan and X-Trim. Please click here for a two-page brochure.

Product Overview

GreyconMill provides extensive functionality to production & converting sites, including:

• Production planning overview & production execution (distribution of instructions to shop floor)
• Monitor production from all machines of the plant
• Production data acquisition and collection from process control equipment, or through operator input
• Quality information capture
• Tracking of produced materials from creation on the primary machines until despatching, including tracking through conversion, packing and other intermediate processes
• Label creation and printing
• Detailed genealogy of each product or individual packages
• Transportation planning of orders and despatching
• Warehouse functionality
• Production performance analysis
• Product costing and reporting vs. budget
• Integration facility with ERP systems
• Built with .NET technology and running on Microsoft SQL Server®

With GreyconMill, Greycon’s aim is to offer a comprehensive Manufacturing Execution System, specific to the Paper and Plastic Film industry, easily adaptable to different customers’ needs and is fast to implement compared to traditional or legacy MES modules.

Benefits/Characteristics

• Supports any converting operation
• Easily scalable: GreyconMill allows for multi-user and multi-site deployment.
• Developed with latest technologies (Microsoft® .NET)
• State-of-the-art user interface
• Seamless integration to S-Plan, opt-Studio and X-Trim
• Easily customisable and configurable by the user
• Proven Integration with ERP systems
• Rich interface capabilities to process automation

Functionality Overview

Production Planning Overview & Shop Floor Instructions

GreyconMill offers the possibility to review the planned schedule by reviewing campaigns, the scheduled orders and the trim patterns; this can be done in both a graphical and tabular display. This allows for easy review of the plan in the plant floor.

GreyconMill allows monitoring production activity at any station in the shop floor, including Paper Machines, Winders and Cutters among others.

Production Tracking

GreyconMill allows tracking any converting operation. Its innovative architecture allows to easily model any operation. This functionality gives flexibility at the moment of implementing the product.

Label Printing

• Labels can be customized to fulfill different customer needs.
• Labels can be printed with different information/layout and in different languages depending on the customer.
• It is possible to print a label after every operation.
• IBarcode support

Genealogy

Each product and individual package can be tracked and its full history can be seen in GreyconMill.

GreyconMill has a very intuitive graphical interface to display the genealogy along with the information of each production stage.

Transportation Planning and Despatch

GreyconMill allows to plan the transportation of orders based on preset routes.

The functionality includes:

• Different loading, transportation and delivery calendars can be assigned to each route.
• User has to check that calculated plan is ok and let GreyconMill do the planning according to set rules.
• Alert if orders are late in production according to their planned despatch date.
• Document creation for the transportation of each order (picking lists, etc...)

Integration with opt-Studio, S-Plan and X-Trim

When a production or conversion schedule is released from S-Plan or a new trimmed run is released from X-Trim, GreyconMill automatically picks this information up and displays it so that it can be taken into account by the production department immediately. If there are urgent changes that need to be done in production, GreyconMill can handle these as well and the machine operator can then follow the revised schedule.

Product Costing and Reporting vs. Budget

• All machines have all events recorded (input, output, shuts, breaks, start-ups, etc).
• Reason codes and comments can be left by the operators/shift foreman before leaving the shift.
• Production and efficiency reporting per machine, shift, product, substance among others.
• Production is compared to ideal production for machine reporting.
• GreyconMill recipes are used to calculate production costs.

Warehouse Functionality

GreyconMill provides tracking of stock and stores the warehouse location for all packages. GreyconMill supports a hierarchy of warehouse and sub location. It is also possible to integrate GreyconMill to more complex warehousing solutions in case there is an existing application in the mill or the functionality that it provides is too specialised.

The warehouse data and information is also integrated with the S-Plan Inventory Manager to give visibility to the planner about stock availability and the possibility of allocating some packages to future orders. Please see the S-Inventory Manager overview in the S-Plan page.

Reporting

GreyconMill allows for easy report creation using Crystal Reports or Microsoft Reporting Services. There are a number of standard reports and these can be easily changed to fulfill particular needs in each installation. Please contact Greycon for all the list of the standard reports available.

Quality Information Capture

GreyconMill can interface with lab systems and store quality information for jumbos. Quality information is then displayed on a jumbo map indicating where the jumbo doesn’t meet quality standards as previously defined. Users can also input quality information directly in GreyconMill.

Integration to ERP (Example: SAP)

Leveraging Greycon's Development Partnership with SAP, GreyconMill will accept trim solutions that have been created via APO and multi-output production orders (template PPM). Production against these production orders is reported directly into R/3.

Integration to Process Control Equipment

GreyconMill has a very flexible Integration to Process Control Equipment module. This module allows the connection to production machines in the plant. There are several protocols that are supported by the module, PLC, RS232, ODBC or any custom protocol as well. All protocols are transformed to an internal protocol making adding new ones very easy. Below is an example of some possible connections to the module.