Managing and optimizing your manufacturing plans and data with a task-oriented and easy-to-use web solution
In a global production environment, manufacturers find themselves looking for ways to reduce time-to-market, control costs and manage complexity while maintaining high quality. Factors such as connectivity to manufacturing engineering and production, effectively managing changes, assembly line balancing, forecasting production orders, and more must be considered in the planning and execution phases. Teamcenter Easy Plan, a role-based planning solution, delivers key capabilities to support and execute manufacturing planning.
Teamcenter Easy Plan Capabilities
Easy Plan helps you increase operational efficiency, reduce shop floor errors and maximize your overall engineering productivity. Built on top of the best-in-class Teamcenter® software product lifecycle management (PLM) backbone, Easy Plan helps you leverage existing product and process information, as well as share cross-departmental workflows, so you can optimize your manufacturing bill-of-materials (BOM) and process plan, capture shop floor feedback and manage changes effectively.
Easy Plan works in the Active Workspace client for Teamcenter. Active Workspace is an innovative web-based client platform that simplifies PLM for all users involved in your product lifecycle, accelerates user adoption, and shortens time-to-value by providing a streamlined and intuitive planning experience anytime, anywhere, on any device. Teamcenter is a part of the Xcelerator™ portfolio, a comprehensive and integrated portfolio of software and services from Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Integrated engineering and manufacturing
Easy Plan provides one environment to capture all manufacturing data from different systems and helps you manage global production scenarios. It is well-connected to engineering and execution so that the data and changes can flow seamlessly from one to the other, helping reduce cost and time for new product introduction (NPI). The ability to receive shop floor feedback ensures constant process and quality improvement.
Manufacturing BOM management
Easy Plan provides a task-based solution to define and manage the manufacturing bill-of-materials (MBOM) and to reconcile any product changes coming in the engineering bill-of-materials (EBOM). Managing the EBOM and MBOM in the same place increases accuracy and reduces inventory costs as changes are implemented easily without delays. Virtual validations can be done to ensure the EBOM’s accuracy. This eliminates purchasing outdated parts or producing previous versions of the product, which frequently happens when the EBOM and MBOM are managed in different environments.
Production scenarios and optimization for industrial engineering
Easy Plan provides optimization tools for improving plant-specific activities with features such as line balancing, cycle time analysis, and station-level walk path estimates. With Easy Plan, accurate production sequence and time analysis of value-added and non-value-added tasks can lead to maximum assembly productivity. Standard time data cards are integrated with Easy Plan for accurate cycle time estimates. What-if scenarios can be defined, executed, and analyzed to ensure the feasibility of assembly processes.
Process planning and validation
Easy Plan provides a solution to define and manage the bill-of-process (BOP) to improve quality while accelerating NPI by validating process plans much earlier. This eliminates costly, late design changes.
The ability to reuse standardized best practices and adjust them based on plant-level requirements leads to significant cost savings and productivity improvements. For centralized manufacturing planning, this approach overcomes the limitation of working with a subset of programs and product configurations. In this manner, any program can be adapted to reflect actual production scenarios. Easy Plan provides a collaborative environment where factory planners can take the process template defined by the central planning department and adapt it to their local resources and capabilities. This integrated central and factory-level planning approach allows better traceability and change propagation to ensure costs associated with product modifications are minimized.
Shop floor work instructions
Easy Plan provides a state-of-the-art solution to author manufacturing work instructions based on the process plan and the manufacturing BOM. It provides an easy-to-use environment to author text instructions with visual aids that are delivered seamlessly to the shop floor for operators to execute the work. Using these electronic work instructions on the shop floor, operators can access the latest information authored in Teamcenter, knowing it is up-to-date and accurate, ensuring good quality during production. They can also use Easy Plan to report back to manufacturing engineering regarding issues found on the shop floor, leveraging the tight connection between manufacturing and execution.
Shop floor users can access the required information offline to work when they are not connected.
Benefits
- Enable intuitive user experience and ease of use for process planning
- Standardize and re-use best practices
- Develop process plans that reflect plant level production scenarios
- Leverage strong configuration and change management for manufacturing data
- Optimize cycle times and production rates
- Provide clear and up-to-date operator instructions
Features
- EBOM and MBOM accountability, reconciliation and visualization
- Configuration using variants and effectivity
- Line balancing and operation time analysis
- Cycle time and production rate estimation
- Textual work instructions and visual aids with markups
- Issue reporting and guided change management
Teamcenter Easy Plan Fact Sheet PDF
FAQ
Easy Plan provides a state-of-the-art solution to author manufacturing work instructions based on the process plan and the manufacturing BOM. It provides an easy-to-use environment to author text instructions with visual aids that are delivered seamlessly to the shop floor for operators to execute the work.
Enable intuitive user experience and ease of use for process planning
• Standardize and re-use best practices
• Develop process plans that reflect plant level production scenarios
• Leverage strong configuration and change management for manufacturing data
• Optimize cycle times and production rates
• Provide clear and up-to-date operator instructions
Easy Plan will help you shift your manufacturing planning activities earlier in the product lifecycle, and enable collaboration between manufacturing and design teams, providing early visibility to potential issues. Easy Plan, built on the Teamcenter PLM backbone, supports a digital thread for controlled and consistent data flow between manufacturing execution systems, and design and manufacturing engineering.
Author, analyze and manage manufacturing plans more efficiently
Communicate plans throughout your organization and extended enterprise more effectively.
Immediately access optimization and validation tools directly from your process plans.
Easy Plan is part of the Active Workspace kit (starting AW 5.1) and can be installed through TEM or Deployment Center.
As far as compatibility is concerned, it follows the same compatibility matrix as Active Workspace.
Yes, until the customer is ready to completely move to Easy Plan, as an intermediate step, our customer can use both clients in parallel. The customer can use MBOM Management in Easy Plan and Process Planner in MPP (RAC) or vice versa, do MBOM Management in MBM (RAC) and Process Planning in Easy Plan as the data model is the same.
Key benefits:
Aligned with the product strategy of MFE and LCS
Improved usability and performance resulting in productivity gains
Rich future roadmap
Zero deployments for a client
Easy Plan uses the Active Workspace client. It provides the same user experience and looks and feel. It is part of the Active Workspace installation, and it is aligned with the Active Workspace release cadence.
Easy Plan and Active workspace both support Product Configurator in Teamcenter, which is the recommended model for variants.