Yokogawa has released the R1.02 upgrade to its Real-time Production Organiser (RPO), a suite of manufacturing execution system (MES) platform packages that integrate the vertical production execution workflow across departments and empower decision makers to organise work quickly and efficiently.
With this new upgrade, RPO now includes Workflow Composer VP, a newly released package that supports the use of Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and is used together with enhanced versions of Production Instructor VP and Production Supervisor VP, as well as third party packages to standardise and automate business processes.
Today's plant operations need to be flexible enough to deal with the challenges of changing feed materials and market demands, says Yokogawa. However, there are many barriers in business processes that impede the flow of information between plant areas, posing serious challenges to agile plant operations — poor information integrity due to insufficient MES connectivity; information resolution gaps that cause misalignment between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and MES; and lack of proper tools for closing loops in business focused manufacturing. It was to address these potential inefficiencies that Yokogawa developed its PRO.
In this latest version, Production Instructor VP issues template-based or manual work orders for correct and prompt execution, monitoring, and analysis to identify best practices. Production Supervisor VP, meanwhile, is used to monitor key performance indicators in real-time on a role-based Web dashboard. CENTUM VP is Yokogawa's newest integrated production control system: this takes the VigilantPlant initiative to its next evolutionary step, integrating the three excellence solutions into one Operational Excellence platform.
