SMIRT Integration at Ford Otosan

Ford Otosan is the Turkish branch of Ford Motor Company. They have a large tool-shop in their main facility located in Kocaeli. Starting from 2011, they implemented SMIRT solutions for viewing, planar milling and drilling, as well as manufacturing planning and management.

In the initial stage Ford Otosan implemented and deployed SMIRT DieShop and SMIRT DieNc for visualization and planar milling and drilling. These two modules became the standard tools in the tool-shop.

In the second stage SMIRT DieBuild was implemented to create the manufacturing plan for the stamping dies to be manufactured in house. SMIRT DieBuild has been integrated with Ford Otosan’s existing system for the general planning of the tool-shop, scheduling, and work tracking. This is an Oracle based software called Icron.

The second stage started with the analysis of Icron’s database and the work flow of Ford Otosan’s tool-shop, in order to define the development specifications. Based on such specs, SMIRTware developed a set of custom integration modules capable of managing the following process:

• For each die, the SMIRT file is processed by the planning engineers with SMIRT DieBuild to
  create the detailed manufacturing process.

• The plan created with SMIRT is uploaded to Icron, in order to schedule the planned activities in
  the plant.

• All the users on the shop-floor read the SMIRT file to access both the design and the planning
  information. The operation view created in SMIRT DieBuild constitutes the detailed description
  of the tasks to be performed in each stage.

• Users update the work in progress by loading directly from within the SMIRT operation view a
  web based application designed to update the Icron database.

• The scheduling is updated by the planning department with the information automatically
  gathered from the floor by the combined SMIRT – Icron solution.

•  Engineering and process changes are equally managed using the same method.

The process described above is fully implemented. Following an ongoing upgrade of the Icron solution at Ford Otosan, a subsequent upgrade of the integration modules of SMIRT is planned near the end of year 2013. This upgrade will further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the integrated solution.