Today’s manufacturing industry requires product data management system (PDM) for efficient product development and production. Manufacturing industries must deal with competition, time to market, reduction of the cost of doing business, and rapid development of new services and products. To address these requirements industries must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their systems and applications to support evolving business processes.

In the part of the PDM solution, workflow management system facilitates creating and executing workflow and controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. This paper proposes an approach to implement web based manufacturing process planning workflow in a pressure die casting industry to overcome the bottleneck associated with the workflow of the company.

The advantage of this work is its efficiency and flexibility of data management and the business processes are explicitly defined. Manufacturing process planning workflow has been implemented to support the business process of the pressure die casting industry.

Problem Definition

 The pressure die casting industry face various problems like time to market, development cost and new product development.It contains various workflows such as manufacturing process planning workflow, production tooling workflow and manufacturing workflow. They are producing numbers of products for various customers. They have various problems in maintaining the product data. Each product contains all types of data like planning data, design data, resource data, manufactured data and quality data. It eliminates the data integrity, minimizes the consistency, redundancy occurred in the data maintenance. The main problem is the sharing of data between the users involved in the workflow. To overcome all the problems, the workflow software is implemented. 

Objective

The objective of the project is to implement web based manufacturing process planning workflow in a pressure die casting industry. This system can be used to reduce the paper content work. Sharing the data between the organizations will be globalized using web enabling. The business process of the company will be improved. The business process of the company explicitly defined so it reduces the time to market of the product. All types of data about product are maintained in the database. Each department workflow has been studied. Based on the study, architecture of the workflow of the department has been drawn. Actors involved in each activity and various tasks have been studied. The use case diagram for all components used in the workflow has been drawn to find out the real problem associated with the system development. Each department workflow related data have been collected to create the web based application.

The architecture of the manufacturing process planning workflow has been created and application is developed using a programming language. User management system has been developed for managing the authentication and authorization of using the application. A revision management system was developed for maintaining the changed data for the product. All systems will be integrated using interface concept and then software testing is conducted to analyze the error in the development of the system. Web based manufacturing process planning workflow system is implemented and deployed in the industry to capture error and to find out the reliability of the system.