Design and implementation of a self-study package for the Smart Production application

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to document the design and creation of a comprehensive self-study package for the SPxSSC application, short for the Smart Production for Steel Service Centers application. The self-study package itself will consist of one single document that goes in-depth about the functionalities of SPxSSC and teaches the reader through hands-on labs about the usage of the application to make them more familiar with procedures and processes that steel service centers around the world use every day. The case company’s Finland branch has been a small part of a larger organization for the last few years now, but it has been integral to the operations of steel service centers since the 1980’s, with some of the original company’s veterans still on board. The branch is responsible for the SPxSSC application, but also provides a more minimal and stripped-down version, the MES (short for manufacturing execution system), as well as the SPx Enterprise, a version of the application tailored for the usage of shipyards for building entire ships from scratch. The SPxSSC application streamlines the entire workflow of a modern-day steel service center and covers a wide range of tools for a variety of different types of workers; there is a user interface for salesmen that allows creating quotations and orders, work management modules for managers and foremen alike, storage management for warehouse workers, and the core that the whole application has been built around, the nesting and cutting tool that a lot of the today’s industry giants use for their steel fabrication purposes. The self-study package is meant for familiarizing the case company’s workers with SPxSSC, the end-goal being a spot in an in-house education and training platform, that covers all the organization’s products’ internal training.