| The production of die&mould companies is a typical make-to-order and one-of-a-kind production. Generally, the work flow to manufacture dies & moulds includes evaluating and accepting orders, planning the production procedure, designing, fabricating, assembling and testing. However, the production procedure is dynamic and changeable because the customers'order is unpredictable and the manufacture process depends on the experience. Consequently, the production is hard to be controlled and the delivery time is always delayed. In order to solve the problems mentioned above and enhance the level of management, it is necessary for die&mould companies to apply the Management Information System.According to the characteristics of the production of mould companies, the master production schedule and the design process management are analyzed, and UML method is then used to describe their function requirements. Meanwhile, the Concurrent Engineering and Network Planning Technique are applied to make the master production schedule, and Gantt chart is used to represent the result. For evaluating the effect of the master production schedule, the master production schedule is directly associated with the real operations in workshop. To the design process management, a flexible configuration method is used to control the design procedure, and a hybrid FTP and database method are adopted to maintain the version of design archive in order to keep the consistent of design data.Based on the methods mentioned above, a master production schedule and design process management system was developed by using MVC architecture and J2EE platform. It has been integrated with eMan (a system for the production management of Die & Mould), and implemented successfully in some mould companies. |
