Manufacturing environments can be classifed as discrete, repetitive, or process, or combinations this post will give more insights on different methods.
Project Manufacturing
Project manufacturing is used to meet demand driven production requirements for large contracts or projects.
Project manufacturing allows you to plan, schedule, process, and cost against a specific contract or a group of contracts for a specific customer.
Also it is possible to make task references to planned orders, jobs (part of Discrete Manufacturing), purchase orders, sales orders, miscellaneous transaction and other entities within Oracle Manufacturing.
Discrete Manufacturing
Discrete manufacturing is used for assemblies that you make in groups or batches.
It involves defining jobs with a job name, a job type, assembly, a job quantity, a start date, and an end date and use assembly bills of material to create job material requirements and routings to schedule job production activities and create operation specific material and resource requirements.
Discrete manufacturing is the most common production method for the application of flow manufacturing. Shippable end items are usually measured in individual units or "each". The production quantities produced in manufacturing can vary from one to large order quantities. In contrast to process intensive factories, discrete manufacturing usually requires more people than machines.
Flow Manufacturing
Flow Manufacturing is an innovative manufacturing approach that aligns production with customer demand.
Flow manufacturing employs Just-In-Time (JIT) concepts such as manufacturing to demand (vs. forecast),
- Production lines for families of products
- Pull material using kanbans
- Consume automatically material and costs upon completion
These in turn helps decrease inventories, optimize machine utilization, reduce response time to customer needs, and simplify shop floor activities. The most important part is to design production lines and production processes so that each line can produce a constantly changing mix of products within a family at a steady rate.
In flow manufacturing a product progresses through its manufacturing processes without stopping, like water in a river, hence the term "flow.
The goal of the flow manufacturer is to design and create a manufacturing line capable of building different products, one at a time, using only the amount of time required to actually complete the work.
Wait time, queue time, and other delays are largely eliminated in flow manufacturing.
Process Manufacturing
Process Manufacturing automates the entire product lifecycle for recipe-based manufacturing, from new product development, recipe management and production, to cost, quality, and regulatory management. It enables you to formulate products to individual customer specifications, manage variability, optimize capacity, and drive continuous process improvement.
Continuous manufacturing is another name of "process" manufacturing.
Assemble-to-Order(ATO) Manufacturing
This is where available options for unique product configurations. You can master schedule models and options then create work orders to build these unique configuration.
Repetitive Manufacturing
You use repetitive manufacturing for assemblies you make on a continuous or semi continuous basis over a predefined interval.
You identify which assemblies are built on which production lines in advance. You can build assemblies on dedicated lines (one assembly per line) or on mixed model lines (many assemblies per line). You can build an assembly on multiple lines.
You define repetitive schedules by the assembly, its daily quantity and its production lines, no job or work order exists. You can schedule production of a single assembly continuously for just a few hours or for any number of days.
You can schedule repetitive production based on the fixed lead time of your production line if the lead time does not vary from one assembly to another assembly. If the lead time varies by assembly, you can schedule the repetitive production time based on the routing of the assembly the line is building.
In repetitive manufacturing, you charge the cost of production directly to the assembly and line. You analyze and report costs by assembly and line during the period close. At period close, all charges to a repetitive assembly for that period are totalled and divided by the number of assemblies produced during that period. Period close also calculates assembly costs and usage variances.
Oracle Applications supports discrete, project, repetitive, assemble-to-order, and flow (work order-less) manufacturing methods