Line Management

Most manufacturers have the concept of a line, whether it is called a production line, manufacturing line, or assembly line. On a line, raw materials are converted to finished goods through various process steps to produce a final product.

Lines can be very simple, such as a linear series of machines and work areas that enhance the value of the product in an ordered manner with the previous step being completed before the next step can begin. Other lines can be more complex, with parallel equipment or even parallel segments of multiple pieces of equipment to increase throughput.

In MES, each entity of a line has a production rate based on the item being processed. As a whole, the line production rate is limited by the slowest entity or parallel entity segment, referred to as the bottleneck.

The following topics explain the main concepts of the MES implementation of line management.