Lantek MES Manager traces production for Industry 4.0

With Lantek’s MES Manager manufacturing execution system, engineers can upload a bill of materials for the products being manufactured, including parts and subassemblies. Parts then are filtered according to material type and thickness and ready for nesting in the company’s Expert CAD/CAM software. At this stage additional parts from other jobs or remanufactured parts can be added to the nest for optimized material usage.

Within the MES, the full sequence of operations required for the manufacture of each part or subassembly—such as laser cutting, punching, bending, assembly, and painting—is stored.

On the shop floor Lantek MES Wos resides on standard touchscreen computers or tablets for data capture and to provide operators with details of the sequence of manufacturing operations. Links to the machines record start and finish times for cutting; for other tasks, employees can log on to jobs and operations, recording the progress of each part around the workshop in a paperless environment.

Links back to the MES make this information available in report form so managers can see exactly where parts are in the production process in real time.