Manufacturing Process Planning Overview and Installation

Manufacturing Process Planning Overview and Installation

Expanding on our series, we will be continuing with an in depth look at the installation process and overview of the Manufacturing Process Planning application, or MPP, offered within Aras Innovator. Our MPP application enables creation, management, and use of Manufacturing Bill of Materials (MBOM) and Process Plans ensuring your shop floors are in sync with engineering changes. Engineers can transform Engineering Bill of Materials (EBOM) to MBOM while simultaneously building out the Bill of Process (BOP).

Aras Innovator has a very fluid process between applications. Our MPP application is a great example of this; changes are not only intuitive to make within any of the three change processes, but also are updated in real time between each one.

Overview:

Process Planning within Aras Innovator allows one to build a logical and versionable set of work instructions. Using a simple document editor utilizing the Technical Documentation Framework Aras ensures that every step in your resulting process plan is meticulously curated.

When looking at the standard process plan form there are two relationships given, related part and location. Here we can specify the part produced by this plan and the location in case they differ between shops.

In the left hand pane we can see our operations, and their contents. Operations can include steps or consumed items, such as parts, documents, skills, and tools: 

The MBOM view gives us a detailed version of the MBOM based off of consumed parts within the process plan. There is also a live reconciliation, showing us how our current MBOM differs from our EBOM. Changes made in the process plan or on the part itself are reflected here. 

The EBOM also has similar reconciliation statuses, but in addition indicates whether a specified part is not being used:

Within each of these applications any changes made will remain in sync as we transform the EBOM into an MBOM with a process plan and work instructions.

Installing the Latest Version:

Installation of MPP is quite easy, in order to move on we’ll need to download Aras Update here. Once the download has completed, go ahead and open the application, we should see a list of applications we can download and install. For this blog I am going to download MPP 12R1, the latest released version of Manufacturing Process Planning. Once you’ve downloaded the package locally, press install and you’ll be prompted for some information. For our default installation of Aras Innovator, here is what your screen should look like:

Once you’ve filled in the correct information, press install and within a few minutes you should receive a successful result message. You can then log into your instance of Aras Innovator and utilize the new functionality. In order to verify the application is installed all you need to do is open up the TOC and there should be a new section called Process which will contain the Process Plan ItemType. Should look like this: 

Conclusion:

Hope you found the latest installation of our series to be useful. We will continue covering the rest of our applications in the future posts, so stay tuned! Comment below if your company uses MPP for their manufacturing needs.