Prodsmart: Digitizing and Automating Manufacturing Processes

GONCALO FORTES: Hello, everyone. Thank you for watching this talk. My name is Goncalo Fortes, and I'm a senior product manager here at Autodesk I'm managing the Prodsmart and the topic of today's talk is how to use Prodsmart to digitize and automate manufacturing processes. So a little bit of admin. This is our safe harbor statement. You can then go back in read it carefully. But in case there are some forward looking statements done during this presentation, there's no guarantees about it. And that's why we have this slide here.

Again, the goal for this talk is to show how Prodsmart can be used to digitize and automate manufacturing processes, and we will have a quick intro and overview of Prodsmart. And then we'll proceed to show a product demo covering a whole manufacturing operation from order to shipping. Finally, we will end with a quick summary.

So without further ado, let's look at what is Prodsmart. Prodsmart was created with the singular mission of empowering manufacturers and fabricators to digitize and automate their processes. It's a software with a mobile component and a web component that helps manufacturers and fabricators to schedule, track, and trace their production quality and maintenance processes in real time.

What are the key takeaways from this talk? There are multiple benefits that this talk can provide. And also the use of Prodsmart can provide. But I chose to group them in terms of manufacturing outcomes, business outcomes, and IT outcomes, and I chose to isolate a few that are going to be where I'm going to be focusing on this talk. And that those are the ones where you can see how Prodsmart can be used to increase your manufacturing flexibility and help you to plan ahead for your production run from a planning standpoint.

From a business standpoint you can understand how your manufacturing process moving forward. And where do you have scrap and waste to minimize those byproducts that waste, and of course save time, money, and opportunity cost. Of this from an IT standpoint with a quick and easy to deploy solution. It's a cloud solution. If you go and sign up, you can get results in days. There is no specific specialized hardware needed. No-- you can use regular available devices, and it's a cloud solution where you can start getting results right away.

So what exactly is Prodsmart and how can it help? Typically manufacturing SMEs, they are still using paper, spreadsheets, and whiteboard based systems that lead to high processing costs, the cost of obtaining the information is very high. Or there's a lack of mission critical information.

And why mission critical? Because Prodsmart sits at the core. It's a shop floor centric solution that optimizes, automates, and digitizes the manufacturing operation in real time from the shop floor upwards. And Prodsmart moves companies from this reality here, the paper based reality, to this reality where you can track all of your process data in real time, and you can show real time dashboards that help your employees to understand what's happening to provide full understanding and visibility about your production line, about your operation. In this case, it's a scheduling dashboard, but we have multiple ones.

Of course these are paper and spreadsheet based systems lead to increased waste and scrap, there's low productivity, deadlines, are missed and with Prodsmart you can immediately decrease these costs. You can have a better understanding of how to reduce your raw materials, waste, and your process waste, eliminate the non-value added time, the cost of obtaining the information because the information is captured in real time, and it becomes immediately available. It enables you to understand where you have bottlenecks, and of course, with all of this visibility and this information available to you, you can increase your efficiency and your revenue, and you can keep your customers happy.

How is Prodsmart different? It's what I've mentioned before. Similar software offerings are usually very expensive. They take months to be sold, years to be deployed. It's a very cumbersome process. But what differentiates Prodsmart is that it's built to be modular and flexible. It adjusts to your business needs and it grows as your business grows. It's plug and play. You can start instantly collaborating with your employees, both in the office, or on the shop floor. Regardless of company size. Because you can sign up, install the mobile app, and start capturing data almost instantly using regularly available devices. Smartphone tablets, barcode and QR code readers, RFID, NFC, you name it. And it supports every production type. Manufacturers and fabricators, high mix, low volume, custom job shops, and mass production assembly lines.

And even though it's a shop floor centric solution, and it's all about the job tracking, it covers the whole business process from order to shipping. We're going to be covering all of these steps during the product demo, but basically it covers the coding process, sales, purchasing and inventory management.

With all of this information, you can prepare your schedule and calculate your material requirements to make sure that you have your raw materials available, and at hand when needed. After that, you are satisfied with your schedule, you start working, you can track your jobs and have a good understanding of job costing, where you are making money and lose money, inefficiencies, and so on and so forth. Product quality in case you need to track it, and all of this with maintenance management and downtime with a clear view of the status of your equipment in real time.

Having said all of this, it's time to jump at the product demo, and to show you what I've been saying and I'm to show you more how Prodsmart can be used to help you digitize and automate our manufacturing process. So there are two components. There is the web management system, and the mobile apps. Because I'm on a flat screen I'm going to be using this virtual smartphone frame here to represent how a mobile app would be used on the shop floor, but basically these would be two separate components, and you would have 10, 15, 90 smartphones or tablets strategically placed throughout your facility, and your employees would be using them. And the information would flow in real time, so that you could see these dashboards being updated to show you the information as it flows.

You can see that we have many different options. Everything is completely configurable. So that each device shows only what's relevant for that specific user, or that specific area of the shop floor or the warehouse. In this case, we're going to be covering a couple of these options so that you can see how this can work.

Having said this, I will start by following the business process, and everything begins with a quote. And you can create a quote that you can send to your customer. You have the products here, the quantity, the price. We calculate the cost for you, and you can see what will be the cost for this quote.

And as soon as the quote is approved, it can be turned into a sales order, or a PO sales order from our standpoint, PO from the customer's standpoint. When this sales order is created, you can save the sales order and create a job, but most interestingly I want to show you how you can actually create and schedule multiple jobs by selecting them in bulk. And you can see that I'm choosing several sales orders here. And now I can start by creating my jobs out of these six sales orders.

You can see all the available information here. You might choose to group a few. The software tries to automate all of these tasks for you. And as soon as you are happy, you can create your jobs. And you can see that I've just created eight jobs with just a couple of clicks, and in seconds.

All of these jobs then can be visualized on a schedule here where you can have granular visibility of the step by step process which equipment will be using machine availability, where do you have collisions and bottlenecks so that you can sort them out. And you can see all of this information, and then this case, I'm showing you a step by step view of the schedule, but you can also see a machine oriented view that shows you what jobs will be running in each piece of equipment and when what is that the capacity and the installed capacity and the potential running time of your equipment. And what is the scheduled load based on the effort and resources that these jobs require.

You can also see a job oriented approach here, where we visually show you what's happening. You can move things around, if needed. And we also do production leveling. In this case, you can see here that you are actually overscheduling a bit, in which case you should probably make some adjustments, and there you go, it's fixed.

So you can get all of this information in a very visual way, very easy to use. You can adjust everything on the go. But the software helps you to prepare for everything. And then when all of this is done, you have your schedule in place and you know that everything is in order.

Proceeding now to the raw materials. Everything is scheduled. We know how we will be sequencing our jobs, which equipment we'll be using, but now we need to make sure that we have all the raw materials in place. And you can see that our MRP calculations here show you right away for each part number or product that you'll be shipping, if you have them available in your warehouse ready to fulfill your sales order directly without producing anything, or if you actually need to go and produce something, this could be also a sub assembly so that you could assemble your parts and then ship them. But it also shows you the raw materials that you need to purchase, and it helps you to create the purchase orders automatically based on these calculations.

So now I've just addressed and automated the process of scheduling, and also the process of purchasing. And in this case you could issue purchase orders to your vendors automatically by creating them like this. There you go. I've created one individually. Before in this case you could create them all in a single action to make everything much faster.

With the production orders created, then you can look at your inventory. But now I want to start introducing the mobile aspect of the system where we will have your employees receiving the raw materials, staging them, starting to track their jobs, and so on and so forth. So in here you can see the inventory on hand, but now that you've created the purchase orders, your employees can receive the materials when they arrive. You can see that we have a couple of purchase orders that we're waiting for. The truck is there by the warehouse, we know what we need to receive, and we're going to be receiving 58 units of this product here, and storing them in warehouse B shelves 2.

And now we're done with this one. And let's receive yet another purchase order. This is a different employee who's is going to be receiving this one. I'll choose a different one. That one was already received. And I'll use this one here, where we still have 30 units of this raw material to go. And I'll store it here again, in shelf 1. There we go.

So in this case, we are receiving the raw materials, but now I want to show you the job tracking in real time. So we've created all of those jobs. And you can see them also here in this list view. These are the same jobs that you are seeing on that schedule, and you can see that we are showing the ones-- let me add the filter here so that we focus on the ones that are going to be working on-- you can see that there are some in progress. In this view, it's kind of the transition between the scheduling process, and the beginning of the process on the shop floor, because it shows you not only what's scheduled to run, but you can also see more information about what's happening on the shop floor.

And how is this information captured? Because if you look at our dashboard here, this is our real time dashboard, it interacts with what's happening on the shop floor. And I'm going to proceed to show you how this works. So we have John punching in the morning here, and John is going to be working on this job here, this part number, and he's going to be performing the quality control.

And there is no way, so this is a quality checklist. This is completely configurable, and because John is doing this inspection, we see that everything is in order. And now we got a real time update here. It's showing us that this job is finished. Let's make this a bit more interesting and have a few more employees. So we have Mary. Mary is going to be starting to work on the nesting of this other product here, and you'll see the real time update here. There we go.

Let's start a few more. And you'll see that we have this other employee checking in on this other job here. And you can see that the dashboard reacts in real time, and this is a ticking sound like a clock. And many of our customers, what they do is that they have a variation of this dashboard. We have custom dashboards, with custom widgets. Either in the office, focused on efficiency for example, on the shop floor, focusing on showing the employees what are the KPIs, their schedule, and so on and so forth.

And you can see that we have other dashboards here that show you the availability of your equipment. And you can see immediately if a piece of equipment is down for maintenance, if it's currently working on a specific job, if it's idle, and I'm going to show you now how we could perform maintenance and start a down time for example on this CNC here where we need to perform some maintenance. So the equipment now will become unavailable it's the one on the upper left corner. In a few seconds it should turn red.

And by doing this, not only we keep track-- there we go, it's red. So this here enables us not only to keep track of the repair works, maintenance order, spare parts management, maintenance checklists, you name it. But it also interacts with the actual execution of the process, and if suddenly a job becomes unavailable to-- an equipment becomes unavailable, that means that job will either need to be rerouted to a second piece of equipment that can perform the same task, or no one will be able to move forward with that job, meaning that we are also mixing this information together in order for you to keep track of the overall process.

I'm going to go back to the dashboard here just to finish a couple of these jobs. And we have employee number three here. We just finished nine units, and there is also a check-- a quality checklist here to take. And now let's finish a few more. And we have this other employee also working on the pressing, using this piece of equipment here. And let's turn this into something a bit more interesting so that you can see the dashboards moving forward.

Why am I adding this additional data here? Because I want to show you now how the data is being recorded, and how it's turned into actionable information for you. So all of that information is available both in our reports, but also in this screen that I was showing you, and you can see right away where you're making money and losing money, because you can see if you're ahead of schedule or behind schedule on every task.

In this case, it's a screen that shows you information in an aggregated way. But if you want to get the fully detailed report you can extract it here, and it shows you everything you need to know about this job with a color code for you to focus on the right things. Red is bad, green is good. There's maintenance and downtime. This was a team task. Multiple people performing the same task, and so on and so forth. You can see that we have around 100-- around 50 production records here.

But if we want to look at this from a process oriented perspective, those 50 production records, they actually represent eight steps of a process. And you can see right away that you're losing money on these two first steps. These two are barely paying the bills, and finally, we're making money here on these final steps. So you know right away which products are profitable, which steps of the process are profitable, and which ones require attention.

As I mentioned before, in this case because I'm on a flat screen, I'm pushing buttons on a tablet. But all of this can be done through the use of barcode tracking. And you can see that Prodsmart creates a barcode enabled traveler for you to very, very quickly capture all the data you need on the shop floor, and you can use the phone's camera to do it.

This covers the portions of production tracking with a bit of quality. We have the quality inspection there with a couple of checklists. We had a bit of maintenance. But I want to go back here again and show you a bit more about the maintenance orders, so you can see that in the case that I chose to illustrate, I went straight to the maintenance works, but you can actually create maintenance orders that can be scheduled, can be corrective, maintenance, preventive maintenance. It can be recurring maintenance where you assign the different checklists that the employees might need to keep track of, and you can also keep track of the spare parts that are used, and what is the cost of maintenance here.

Finally, I want to finish by showing you our reports. I've shown you that the sample report that was available in the job view, but as you can see, we have many different types of available reports. But not just that you can actually mix and match and filter and sort the information however you need it. So if you want to see which jobs are profitable, which employees are struggling, which products are profitable, you can sort everything out the way you need it, and the software shows you all the data.

And again, everything is color coded for your convenience, and you can see right away which jobs were profitable and which ones were not. Which employees are struggling and which employees are being successful. Which product lines or part numbers are profitable and which ones are not. So I hope that this product demo helped you to understand how Prodsmart can be beneficial for you, and to help you to digitize and automate your processes with an overview of the overall process from order to shipping. And with this, I finished my talk, and I want to thank everyone for joining again. Thank you very much.