Industry Background
The coatings industry is accelerating its transition toward smart manufacturing as digitalization and low-carbon initiatives advance across the industrial sector. Coatings production is a typical batch process in which material feeding is discrete, fluid, and discontinuous, and many process parameters must be adjusted during production. The introduction of automation and digital technologies plays a critical role in increasing capacity and reducing energy consumption. As a result, building environmentally friendly, energy-efficient, and high-performance intelligent green production lines has become the future direction for coatings manufacturers.
Management Challenges
In recent years, coating products have shifted toward greater variety, smaller batch sizes, customized specifications, and rapidly changing formulations. A high volume of orders, short delivery cycles, and customer-specific customization requirements place significant pressure on coating manufacturers in terms of order status tracking, material feeding management, production reporting, and formulation control.
- Execution of production processes relies heavily on manual control, creating process-related risks.
- Raw materials and product attributes are highly complex, and materials are variable and interchangeable, making batch traceability difficult.
- Production reporting for each process step is manually entered, resulting in data that is neither real-time nor accurate, making it impossible to perform timely analysis, issue alerts, or support production scheduling.
- Quality inspection lacks systemization; inspections are performed manually, results are recorded on paper, and querying or reporting abnormalities is inconvenient.
- Material feeding and weighing rely on operator experience, without system-based controls, making it impossible to strictly follow formulation requirements.
- Slow response to process abnormalities, causing low efficiency and potential batch-quality issues
- The production process lacks transparency, preventing real-time understanding of line conditions and full-process product traceability.
Solution
The digital solution from Morewis for the coatings industry eliminates information silos inside and outside the enterprise, enabling data connectivity and data-driven decision-making across key production stages—including raw material warehouses, temporary storage, batching, mixing, semi-finished storage, packaging, and finished-goods warehouses. The solution provides a tailored management platform for coating manufacturers, covering R&D to production, production control, and full quality traceability. The solution also focuses on formulation management, process monitoring, production reporting, quality control, and product traceability. It enables upgrades across multiple dimensions, including production informatization, structured process modeling, automated feeding control for tank areas, precise quality traceability, and full equipment interconnectivity across the plant. Together, these capabilities help manufacturers further improve efficiency, output, and quality, enhancing the overall performance and competitiveness of coating production lines.
Addressing Core Needs
- Use structured process modeling to configure the system-defined sequence of material inputs, enabling mistake-proofing throughout the process flow.
- Implement end-to-end barcode management, automatically linking each product's barcode with the corresponding process, material, and quality data to establish complete product traceability.
- Support pre-production verification of required production resources (personnel, processes, formulations, equipment, etc.), and enable production dispatching and reporting by workshop, production line, or process category.
- Enable full business-level coordination across SAP, MES, additive systems, and powder systems, with automated release of work-order batching instructions and fully automated operations for powder/additive batching and powder feeding.
- Provide production prompts on PDA mobile terminals combined with barcode-based mistake-proofing to effectively prevent incorrect, missing, or excessive material feeding.
- Support refined work-order management by linking work orders with manufacturing orders and enabling workshop-level receipt threshold alerts for packaging orders.
- Trigger full-process tracking of production data through the work-order quality inspection module, enabling complete end-to-end quality traceability across all process nodes.
- Use shop-floor dashboards to monitor equipment status, capacity utilization, OEE, and real-time exceptions, while visual reports help define daily management priorities and track detailed abnormalities.
Mixing Production Management
Packaging Process Management
Implementation Benefits
- Raw-material barcode management combined with end-to-end batch traceability ensures full product quality traceability.
- Fully automated batching and feeding for powders and additives reduces manual workload and improves batching accuracy.
- A reliable, controllable, and traceable process-control model enhances production execution efficiency and precision while ensuring product quality.
- Real-time collection of production data enables transparent and flexible manufacturing.
- In-depth, multi-dimensional statistical analysis provides strong data support for process optimization, operational control, and management decision-making.
