glovia g2 setting the standard for real …...glovia g2—setting the standard for real-time...

GLOVIA G2—SETTING THE STANDARD

FOR REAL-TIME MANUFACTURING IN

ENTERPRISE RESOURCE

PLANNING (ERP)

FUJITSU GLOVIA, INC.

Ted Rohm, Senior ERP Analyst

April 2019

WWW.TECHNOLOGYEVALUATION.COM

GLOVIA G2—Setting the Standard for Real-time Manufacturing in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) www.technologyevaluation.com 1

GLOVIA G2—Setting the Standard for Real-time Manufacturing

in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Glovia, from Fujitsu Glovia, Inc., has a long history of supporting manufacturers

that require real-time control over their operations. GLOVIA G2 has its roots in a

solution from Xerox named ChESS MRP II, which was first released in 1990. The

solution’s original modules were built to support manufacturing, and GLOVIA G2

was adopted at Fujitsu’s manufacturing facilities in the 1990s. The product was

expanded to support the increasingly complex enterprise requirements of Fujitsu

and manufacturing industries such as automotive, aerospace and defense,

industrial machinery, and telecommunications. Fujitsu was so impressed with the

product that they eventually acquired 100% control of it in 2000.

The Glovia solution was built to solve complex manufacturing requirements and

to process transactions in real time. These are important differentiating

characteristics of GLOVIA G2. The majority of other ERP solutions currently on the

market were built first as financial solutions while others were built around batch

transaction processing. The manufacturing operations components of these

systems were then built on top of these financial solutions, which means that the

financial operation is the primary focus of all operations and the manufacturing

operations are more of an afterthought. Additionally, many earlier ERP systems

were built to push transactions in batch mode across the system. GLOVIA G2 was

built from day one to be a real-time solution for manufacturing. GLOVIA G2

customers have always been able to process material requirements planning

(MRP), master production schedule (MPS), and advanced planning and scheduling

(APS) operations multiple times a day. Users of other ERP systems must run these

processes overnight or during non-peak hours to make sure the system isn’t

brought to its knees.

In this report, we will look at three areas of GLOVIA G2 that help support today’s

real-time manufacturing requirements. These are a lean user experience, the

shop floor dispatch tool, and the powerful factory planning tool for APS.

Lean User Experience The GLOVIA G2 user experience is designed, like the underlying ERP system, to

support lean operations. The key thesis of lean manufacturing is to eliminate

waste in the manufacturing process. Similarly, critical aspects of the GLOVIA G2

user interface have been built to eliminate wasting time in the system to get

things done. The GLOVIA G2 home page (figure 1) provides a user with a set of

customizable panes that provide access to the functions in the system.


Figure 1. GLOVIA G2 home page

A user can set up as many or as few of these panes as required to get her/his job

done on a daily basis. As shown in figure 1, users will often have a messages pane,

a pane for common tasks, and other panes grouped as needed by the user. One

pane in the figure shows the G2 Insights that this particular user should be

monitoring. The G2 Insights are notifications pushed down to the user on a real-

time basis. This pane is then populated with the latest tasks that the user should

be monitoring.

Figure 2. Data grids


The figure above shows the data grids, which are an underlying component of the

user interface. GLOVIA G2’s data grids look like Excel spreadsheets, but they are

even more powerful. A data grid lets a user create a personalized view of the

data. A user is able to filter the results by any column, sort data in ascending or

descending order with a click of the column header, change the order of columns

displayed, and group the data by one of the columns. The data can be

downloaded to Excel for further manipulation. Most of these operations can be

performed via drag-and-drop functions. Each grid is set up with a refresh rate, but

the user can refresh the grid at any time.

A user can right-click on an object to see available operations on an element in

the data grid. These functions include sending messages or emails, or performing

some other function within GLOVIA G2. In the case of work orders (figure 2

above), these functions might include work order maintenance, work order

inquiry, work order completion, and inventory inquiry.

An administrator can set up which functions can be personalized for each user.

Some users may be able to view or hide only certain columns or perform only

specific operations within a data grid. And the data grids can display a chart

beside the data to visualize the data being viewed, as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3. Sales order grid with pie chart

Shop Floor Dispatch The shop floor dispatch tool has been built to be the “one stop shop” for

recording all production activity against work orders and repetitive schedules

within GLOVIA G2. The screen was designed for touch screens and point-and-click

navigation. All production activities are available from this screen including clock-

on/clock-off, component scrap, operation scrap, assembly scrap, operations/item


completions, inspection results/alerts, component verification, availability and

issues, tooling verification, order release, and order inquiry/maintenance.

Figure 4 shows a dispatch list where material availability is displayed for an item

via a handheld scanner.

Figure 4. Shop floor dispatch screen

The shop floor dispatch list is built on the GLOVIA G2 data grid technology,

allowing for all the customization needed to manage dynamic production

activities. This application was built for operators on the factory floor to give

visibility into all the jobs planned for the individual’s workstation.

A user might need to quickly change the filters on the work orders displayed to

perform all operations using a particular tool on hand. Or, an operator might need

to switch to another set of operations due to a material shortage that occurred

because of excess scrap. The flexibility of the shop floor dispatch tool provides

users with the proper tools to do the job and minimizes the keystrokes needed to

record activity. In fact, many of the operations require little to no user input.

In addition to the standard data grid capabilities, the shop floor dispatch tool adds

additional graphical indicators to highlight the important information for the user.

The color displayed for a work order can change depending on multiple tolerance

limits set to low, medium, or high. Un-released orders will be shown with a gray

background if not late. The overall result is that users get simple screens that

present them with the right orders and the right options for executing the

manufacturing activity at hand.


Factory Planning GLOVIA G2 Factory Planning is an advanced planning system (APS) that takes into

account multiple constraints to generate an optimized production schedule. The

system can take into account any constraints on material, machine capacity, setup

and runtime capacity, labor skill sets, and machine tooling. Factory Planning

determines the production schedule based on these finite constraints to

accurately determine capable-to-promise (CTP) commitments for customer

orders. Many ERP systems and their planning tools are able to determine only

available-to-promise (ATP) dates; these systems assume infinite capacity while

other systems offer CTP tools that lack the sophisticated capabilities of the

GLOVIA G2 system.

Users have extensive control over the information that they see in factory

planning. Each of the various panes of information can be configured to suit an

organization’s and individual’s unique needs. The views or panes of information

include an order pane, a seiban order pane, a planning board, a teams pane, a

team/skill workload pane, and an inventory pane. Figure 5 shows the order,

workload, and inventory panes. This is a great example of how the system makes

it easier to manage production schedule problems. In figure 5, one can see that

there is a problem with the inventory on one of the items on the order. From

here, it’s easy to jump to that particular item and take the necessary action to get

rid of the inventory shortage.

Figure 5. Factory planning screen with multiple panes

Factory planning is a memory-resident data model that is a seamless extension of

the GLOVIA G2 system. This means that any events posted to the GLOVIA G2

system will be reflected in real time in factory planning. For example, any events

recorded in shop floor dispatch will impact factory planning in real time. If a user


receives inventory, completes a manufacturing job, or a machine goes offline, the

event is immediately visible in factory planning. In many systems, these events

will be loaded into the planning tool via some batch update facility and inevitably

lead to inaccurate schedules.

But probably the most impressive capabilities in factory planning are the

extensive array of planning scenarios supported by factory planning. These

include:

• Scheduling directions—forward, backward, and mixed

• Flexible interactive settings of constrained resources

• Simultaneous checking of resources (capacity, inventory, and tools)

• Full optimization to reduce setup times

• Full optimization to improve the flow through complex processes

• Instant re-optimization after machine breakdown or inventory shortage

• Planning based on labor skills, resources, and/or team-based

manufacturing

• Scheduling groups—used for mixed-mode manufacturing scenarios

where orders for certain items have priority over order for other items

• Multi-pallet / Product carrier planning—plans for machines where

multiple pallets of items are placed on tools and prepared for sequential

processing in the machine

Figure 6 shows how some of these scheduling parameters are set up in factory

planning. This figure shows various scenarios and the flexibility in setting the

parameters against those scenarios. Here a planner can also set workday patterns.

Workday patterns can be assigned at the enterprise, machine, tools, labor skill,

and labor resource levels. This is where all the factory shifts, holidays, and

exclusions are set up.


Figure 6. Factory planning scheduling params and settings

Another notable capability of factory planning is that it can be integrated with

other ERP systems or data sources to get insight into information outside of the

customer’s GLOVIA G2 database. Factory planning also supports multi-plant

dependencies, where one plant depends on another for product or supplies.

Real Time Is Part of GLOVIA G2’s DNA GLOVIA G2 is one of the best-kept secrets in the manufacturing ERP market.

The system is built to support organizations of different sizes (from just a few to

thousands of users), and various industries (automotive, electronics, aerospace

and defense, capital equipment, and other manufacturers). GLOVIA G2 supports

multiple manufacturing processes, such as make to stock [MTS], make to order

[MTO], configure to order [CTO], and engineer to order [ETO]. The system also

supports anywhere from high-touch engineer-to-order operations to

manufacturers that can completely automate and have virtually

lights-out operations.


GLOVIA G2 was built from day one to support real-time manufacturing

operations. The majority of current day manufacturing ERP systems say they run

in real time. But, when you take a closer look at what “real time” means to other

vendors, you’ll find that they don’t meet up to GLOVIA G2’s standards. Real time

is in the DNA of GLOVIA G2, starting with the way that transactions are pushed

across the system to the system’s shop floor dispatch and factory planning tools.

Organizations requiring a sophisticated discrete manufacturing ERP solution

should take a serious look at GLOVIA G2.


About the Author

Ted Rohm covers the areas of enterprise resource

planning (ERP), commerce, customer relationship

management (CRM), enterprise asset management

(EAM), configure price quote (CPQ), supply chain

management (SCM), and IT service management

(ITSM), with a particular expertise in manufacturing.

He has over 20 years of experience in large-scale

selection, design, development, and implementation

projects, primarily in the biotech/pharma industry.

Prior to joining TEC, Rohm worked for a number of

companies including Oracle, Syntex, and Genentech (now part of The Roche

Group). Rohm worked with Genentech for 13 years, starting as a senior

programmer analyst responsible for building custom applications using the Oracle

Tool suite in support of sales and marketing and product distribution. He then

became senior manager of commercial systems, where he directed the

development, deployment, and operations of enterprise-wide applications for the

sales and marketing departments. Rohm was the principal systems architect

during his last few years at Genentech, focusing mainly on the implementation of

SAP ERP and its integration with other systems.

Rohm holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Columbia

University and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Allegheny College.

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