Introduction
The Bike Company is divided into three main manufacturing areas: Assembly, Quality Control, and Repair. In the Assembly area, shop floor personnel put together the components that make up the bicycle, such as the wheels and gear. In the Quality area, shop floor personnel perform the final inspection on the bicycle. The goal of the final inspection is to ensure that the bicycle is working as expected, following the predefined quality and security standards. If the quality inspection fails, there is also an area dedicated to repairing. Three supervisors, the Assembly supervisor, the Quality Control supervisor, and the Repair supervisor, oversee each manufacturing area. Each supervisor is responsible for controlling different activities and dedicated shop floor personnel. Additionally, each area requires different types of equipment and skilled operators.
Work Center
In SAP Digital Manufacturing, the areas of Assembly, Quality Control, and Repair can be defined as three distinct work centers. A work center is a specific location at a plant where goods are made, processed, or stored. Work centers divide the portions of a routing along functional work lines. Therefore, a work center corresponds to a sequence of resources needed to make or assemble a material.
In SAP Digital Manufacturing, work centers are used for the following purposes:
- To determine the granularity of the work in progress (WIP) reports.
- To group together different equipment that are system-wise managed as resources, for example, several identical drills are available at the same workbench.
- To interface equipment on the shop floor.
- To control where the demand is being released.
- To control whether the logged in user can start work in a work center.
In SAP Digital Manufacturing, work centers are set up using the Manage Work Centers application.
On the header level, the work center is defined per plant and described by a main name, for example, WC-ASSEMBLY-00. On the Main tab, you can maintain the work center description and status (such as enabled or disabled). The work center category is used to describe the hierarchy for reporting purposes. The following work center categories are available:
- None: No work center category is specified.
- Cell: The work center category is a manufacturing or service unit.
- Cell Group: The work center category is a collection of cells.
- Line: The work center category is a single routing.
- Line Group: The work center category is a collection of lines.
- Building: The work center category is a building.
You can also define the maximum and minimum number of people assigned to the work center.
Note
For more information about work centers, refer to the SAP Application Documentation.
Manage User Assignments
To perform any action in a specific work center in SAP Digital Manufacturing, you need to be granted access. Access can be configured in the Manage User Assignments application, under the Work Center tab. If you need access to multiple work centers, you can configure several work centers for a single user.