The plastic processing industry can be subdivided into several branches which have different requirements on the technologies used for shop floor and process control. The project has developed a classification scheme which maps the type and the requirements of a company to the modules of an ideal shop floor control (SFC) system. Furthermore, existing systems for shop floor control, factory data acquisition (FDA), material supply (MSS) and material data management (MDM) have been enhanced and partly integrated at the pilot plant which produces supply parts for the automotive industry and technical parts. The SFC system has been linked to the production planning and control system (PPC) of the pilot plant. Both, SFC and MSS system, have been implemented for modern operating systems (UNIX and Windows NT) and make use of window-oriented user interfaces.
The combined use of the shop floor control, factory data acquisition and material supply system in a factory can save material and energy of an amount of 5-10% depending on the size of the factory so that an investment into an SFC system pays off in a few years. It is expected that the conceptual approach can also be applied in other industries.