From the historical perspective, some keywords can be recognized as milestones of the manufacturing enhancement process. Today, to be in fashion, we must provide smart solutions. We have smart cars, smart grids, smart buildings, and even smart cities. Can we imagine a smart factory? Giving the right answer to this question is only a matter of the definition of the word smart. Nowadays the production of goods is doubtless a challenging activity and needs a steady improvement in the manufacturing environment to compete successfully on the global market. To win on the market, any smart factory cannot be devised as a technology-dependent solution focused on industrial processes (manufacturing) only. The question of how to distribute and finally sell the produced goods is most challenging. It is proposed that the Smart Factory paradigm must, therefore, be addressed to business improvement as well. Manufacturing plants today are frequently a more or less autonomous part of a global organization – they are like clouds on the corporate sky. Furthermore, all factories are a part of the Global Supply Chain and they are surrounded by markets, vendors, and authorities, which must also be seamlessly involved in the business processes. Thus, starting the discussion on the Smart Factory paradigm, collaboration is the main challenge that must be faced. It requires information sharing as well as well-defined and interacted activities governed by procedures. Both information and behavioral models must be consistent and fulfill business process requirements leading to the optimal solution. To sum up the foregoing, to succeed and meet the global scope, the first requirement essential to deploy the vision of the Smart Factory is the Internet connectivity as a foundation of collaboration.
Smart Factory software family - a workflow management system is a group of CAS applications that support automation of business processes, through their precise definition and control of the flow of information and synchronization of the internal and external participants’ activities.
Smart Factory applications support:
- Workflow Driven Management of Logistics Operations in the Cloud (Shepherd),
- Customs clearing - Inward Process Relief (IPR),
- Customs Warehouse Disposal (CW)
Collaboration is a core to improve processes in any organization. It requires information sharing as well as following precisely defined procedures. Both information and behavioral models must be consistent and fulfill business requirements leading to improvements in process performance measured using Key Performance Indicators in critical areas. To be useful for daily process management these indicators must be observable. To engage adoptive information models, control workflows and use Business Intelligence to measure the process performance our applications are deployed on the Microsoft SharePoint as a human-centric foundation using Web Applications to publish and share the content.
Shepherd (Workflow Driven Management of Logistics Operations in the Cloud) by CAS is a SharePoint based application for the coordination of inbound and outbound deliveries from any number of various purpose warehouses. Using Internet technologies, the process participants may cooperate basing themselves on independent schedules for each warehouse. This allows them to optimize logistic processes through:
- Exact planning of inbound and outbound deliveries
- Complete elimination of vehicle queues waiting for loading/unloading
- Making efficient use of resources on hand
- Free selection of time slots (scheduling) according to handling needs and capabilities
- Minimization of organization costs of inbound and outbound deliveries
- Increase of security thanks to identification details of vehicles and people
- Improvement of services provided by partners (vendors, forwarders) due to the necessity of strict adherence to procedures
The process is based on schedules made out according to the needs and available resources. The partners make a remote (online) booking of a time slot according to their preferences using a selected warehouse schedule that includes the occupied time slots. For each warehouse, there can be created any number of inbound/outbound processes to be effected parallel.
Additionally, for any delivery, it is possible to freely select forwarders, escorts and locations where the services are to be rendered, enter a detailed description of each delivery, i.e. route, loading type, destination market and other special arrangements, assessment of the vehicle technical condition, etc.
Detailed logging of all events enables us to monitor and make an objective assessment of the process. A timestamp and user is attributed to each operation. Being assigned to a specific role, the application users have selective access to offered functionality.
Built-in and ad hoc reports allow for full control of expenditure, meeting deadlines, quality, i.e. process flow efficiency assessment.
The application is available also as a service (cloud computing): instead of buying a license, investing in expensive hardware, etc. You pay only for what you need, i.e. for functionality. Thus the implementation time can be considerably shortened.
The application offers a multilingual user interface according to preferences.
- Postol, Mariusz. (2014). Workflow Driven Management of Logistics Operations in the Cloud, Logistyka 4/2014
Electronic IPR (Inward Processing Relief) provides relief to promote exports from the EC and assist Community processors to compete on an equal footing in the world market. It allows businesses to avoid or recover duty on imported raw materials and processed goods. Duty is relieved of imports of non-EC goods, which are processed in the Community and re-exported.
Given the nature of the product processing, it is often difficult to accurately calculate the amount of imported raw materials re-exported in the form of finished products (i.e. goods compensation), especially when there are many finished products, and not all of them can be exported.
The IPR application simplifies the administration and management of inward processing relief from import to export. It is designed to facilitate the handling of import and export documents, and automatic stock records are set up from recipe details. The application automates all the necessary calculations relating to the processing. Particular emphasis is on minimizing the costs associated with the calculation of the number of compensation goods to facilitate the supervision of goods processing.