Benefit oriented production data acquisition for the production planning and control

In order to stay competitive, many manufacturing companies, especially small and medium sized enterprises (SME), face the challenge to transform their production and the corresponding production planning and control (PPC) processes for the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT) Era. Since their time and cost budget is a constraint, SME need to focus particularly on relevant data types, data acquisition points and technologies that will be beneficial for their manufacturing processes. State of the art approaches are lacking in supporting SME sustainably, systematically and company-specific on their way to IoT from a PPC-perspective. Therefore, in this paper a systematic approach is described, which is providing a sustainable, benefit-oriented, and gradual guideline for companies which aim to build an IoT-supported production data acquisition for PPC processes, in order to enable sustainable manufacturing. The developed method is taking into account company-specific production structures through quantitative key performance indicators and qualitative morphological checklists. With the help of the approach proposed in this paper, SMEs are supported systematically on their transformation path of the production data acquisition for the PPC into the IoT Era in order to enable a sustainable production. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.