A Real-time 4M Collecting Method for Production Information System

It can be said that the business sector is faced with a range of challenges—a rapidly changing business environment, an increase and diversification of customers’ demands and the consequent need for quick response—for having in place flexible management and production info systems. As a matter of fact, many manufacturers have adopted production info management systems such as MES and ERP. Nevertheless, managers are having difficulties obtaining ever-changing production process information in real time, or responding quickly to any change in production related needs on the basis of such information. This is because they rely on poor production info systems which are not capable of providing real-time factory settings. If the manufacturer doesn’t have a capacity for collecting or digitalizing the 4 Ms (Man, Machine, Material, Method), which are resources for production, on a real time basis, it might to difficult to effectively maintain the information on production process. In this regard, this paper will introduce some new alternatives to the existing methods of collecting the 4 Ms in real time, which are currently comprise the production field. Keywords—4M, Acquisition of Data on shop-floor, Real-time machine interface