Creating Operation Activities

The bicycle manufacturing process involves three main steps: Pre-Assembly, Assembly, and Final Inspection. These steps follow a specific sequence and each step requires a particular type of equipment or even a specific piece of equipment. If the Final Inspection step fails, it may be necessary to perform rework activities to address any identified nonconformances.

In SAP Digital Manufacturing, operation activities are defined as individual, basic steps that are required to manufacture a product. Operation Activities serve as building blocks for routings and before you create routings, you must first define the operation activities. Each operation activity is started and completed by production operators or machines on the shop floor.

For our example, you must create four operation activities: Pre-Assembly, Assembly, Final Inspection, and Repair.

The operation activities are set up using the Manage Operation Activities application. Each operation when defined can have one of the following statuses:

• New: Users cannot use this operation activity, but they can change this operation record. The operation activity is new and not ready for production.
• Releasable: Operators or machines can work on Shop Floor Controls (SFCs) at this operation activity.
• Obsolete: Operators or machines cannot work on SFCs at this operation activity. This operation activity is no longer used.
• Hold: Operators or machines cannot work on SFCs at this operation activity. This status is temporary. When the hold issue is resolved, users can change the status of this record.

In addition, you can define the operation activity type. The following types are available:

• Normal: Most operations are normal. This operation activity is used to describe standard manufacturing processes. Operators at normal operation activities can start only the SFCs that appear in their work selection lists.
• Special: This operation activity can have special capabilities to operate on SFCs outside of the normal routing. Generally used for exception processing, a special operation activity is the first operation activity on the special routing. An SFC can be started at the special operation activity even if it is in queue at another operation activity on another routing. A special operation is an operation that allows an operator to pull SFCs from another routing. For example, a special operation could be used as a first step on a quality assurance routing to pull work into the routing for random sampling and testing.

You can enter information about the default resource type or a specific default resource. The resource type is used to associate resources of a specific type with the operation being created. You can only execute a given operation using resources of a specified type. If only the default resource type is maintained, the operator can choose from the list of available resources belonging to this resource type when starting a material. If a default resource is specified, the material is started at that resource.

In our example, the resource type of the Assembly operation activity has to correspond to the resource type defined for the assembly station resource. The resource type definition ensures that when starting an SFC at the Assembly operation activity, the shop floor operator only has available for selection the assembly stations and not, for example, drills.