Material Converting Manufacturing Management/Mill Industries Features and Functions
A mill is a factory where value is added to raw materials by processing it into a form suitable either for further manufacturing or for immediate end-use. Outside the food industry, where traditional mills turn grain into flour or extract sucrose from sugar beet and cane, other processes comply with the foregoing definition. Milling applies to a wide range of industrial activities. These include the spinning and weaving mills of the textiles and carpets sectors to the rolling plants of steel, aluminum, and other metals semi-fabricators, to the continuous outputs of paper and board mills. There are several broad categories of non-food mills:1. Metals--typically rolling cast steel or aluminum into sheets and coils or extruding profiles that are sold either to manufacturers or to distributors2. Plastics--similar to metals, these may also be thermally extruded and formed 3. Paper--products usually delivered direct to printers and packaging manufacturers or to wholesalers and distributors4. Packaging--heavier paper-based products such as foil and plastics that mostly go direct to manufacturers across all sectors; deliveries must align with users' production schedules5. Textiles--woven fabrics produced mostly for apparel manufacturers and the décor trade, but also for the retail sector6. Carpets--supplied to the retail trade cut-to-order for commercial and domestic applications; some specialist mills make-to-order (MTO) for corporate applications such as store chains, hotels, cruise liners, and major companiesOne thing all of these mill types have in common is that they have few input materials but there are many variations in what they output. An aluminum ingot, for example, could be rolled to plate inches thick or foil measured in microns--and everything between. A plain clothing fabric could be printed with hundreds of combinations of colors and pattern. This complicates conventional forecasting and planning below the generic level.
|
Hazardous Material Reporting
In the case that some dangerous goods are used for the composition of materials, these goods need to be reported and controlled to satisfy regulatory requirements. Hazard data should be on documentation such as goods receipt notes, quality assurance (QA) test sheets, production orders, selection lists, consignment/dispatch. Safety information should contain storage conditions, flash points, disposal details, COSHH codes, CAS numbers, ELINCS codes, MSDS numbers, packing group, and transport class.
|
Quality Testing and Regulatory Compliance
|
Process Manufacturing Costing
|
Product Costing
Product costing analyzes product costs related to overhead, labor, material, and manufacturing costs. It provides a variety of costing approaches such as standard, actual, and average.
|
Shop Floor Control
Shop floor control is a system for using data from the shop floor to maintain and communicate status information on manufacturing orders and on work centers. Shop floor control can use order control or flow control to monitor material movement through the manufacturing facility.
|
Production Planning
Production planning performs capacity planning and creates a daily/weekly/monthly production schedule for a company’s manufacturing plants. It involves forecasting, production scheduling, and material planning.
|
Cut-to-shape Environments
i.e., metals, plastic, paper, textile, etc.
|
Plastic Injection Molding, Blow Molding, Thermoforming, Transfer Molding, Reaction Injection Molding, Compression Molding, Vacuum Forming, and Extrusion Environments
Plastic sheets cut-to-size would be handled in the previous section, whereas this category covers criteria for mass producing plastic parts, formed to any shape, in custom-made tools.
|
Wire and Cable Manufacturers
While there are many similarities with sheets, wires and cables have special requirements because of both shape and different industry practices.
|
|
ERP for Mill-based and Material Converting Environments Features and Functions
|