Reimagining the Manufacturing Shop Floor

Smart factories, sustainability, hyper-automation, supply chain complexities—the manufacturing shop floor is coping with a daunting list of disruptive challenges. Digital transformation offers powerful answers to those challenges. But navigating the chaotic landscape of digitalization solutions—commercial, homegrown, legacy, customized—could be the greatest challenge of all.

Low-code is the simple solution to a complex problem. A low-code application development platform enables manufacturers to:

• Harmonize their IT infrastructure

• Maximize the value of their core manufacturing systems
• Modernize their legacy systems
• Create sustainable replacement strategies
• Capture and share internal expertise

Low-code can help manufacturers dig themselves out from the mountain of paper, a key step in digitalization. Using Mendix starter templates like Paperless SOP and Product Release, you can increase the quality, uniformity, and efficiency of your shop floor processes.

Manufacturers rely on manufacturing execution systems to implement their digital transformation strategies on the shop floor. Low-code applications let you connect your shop floor systems with an MES, such as Siemens Opcenter, to extend business process needs with a personalized user experience, boosting the pace of your digitalization. 

Everyone on the shop floor—machine operators, production operators, shift supervisors—has unique responsibilities. Mendix starter templates, such as Workforce Management and PLM, ERP, LAB Connect, empower shop floor personnel to easily create personalized applications to support those responsibilities while keeping core systems clean.

Manufacturers can invest heavily in shop floor digitalization, but still find themselves reverting back to error-prone and inefficient paper processes when network connectivity is not available. Mendix applications built as an extension to a traditional MES, such as Opcenter Execution Discrete Offline App, lets you execute work orders digitally even when offline.