Process improvement through a leaner approach and finite scheduling for factory floor can be demonstrated in a number of ways: Minimize cycle time Minimize inventory Meet customer expectations in quality and delivery Look for ways to improve changeover Empower workers Create a culture for continuous improvement

Creating a “culture” for continuous improvement can be realized through another lean concept… use of visual aids. By making factory floor activity visible through use of Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and measuring flow times of parts on a continuous basis, factory has a benchmark from which to identify areas that need improvement and system to demonstrate those improvements.

For example, of factories that are moving to lean manufacturing, how many have put a machine monitoring equipment in place to measure flow time of a part? If there is a system that allows this basic metric, how many can tell percentage of time that parts are being “value-added” verses waste (or non value-added) time? Time is wasted during a downtime occurrence, waiting for a tool/die/mold or other necessary piece of equipment. Other examples of waste are times spent waiting for a quality check or unnecessary time in changeover/set-up.

There are many commercially available XML Servers in market. The popular among them are Tamino Server, Sonic Server and FDX XML Server. Though basic functions of these servers are same way they are implemented and features that they support varies.

The Tamino XML Server is from Software AG and is used to publish and exchange all kinds of data especially XML documents in native format. It handles open standards. Leveraging on XML technologies will improve an organizations data access.

Exchange of data between different applications on different platforms is possible using XML technologies. Hence organizations are moving on to store their data in XML format to take advantage of XML technologies. Storing data in XML format improves performance of delivery and scalability of your applications with low operational and administrative costs.

In traditional relational databases, data is stored in rows and columns which can be too complex. But in case of an XML Server such complexity is avoided and any data can be stored which includes even multimedia files and even relational data. These data can be easily retrieved at lightning speed using a Tamino XML Server.

To retrieve data that is requested by any application, XQuery is used in Tamino XML Server. This server implements XQuery specification draft. Hence queries on server can be issued using internet and data can be returned in any format by using XSL style sheets. Thus customers can manipulate format of presentation of data that is presented using style sheets. High speed retrieval of data is possible in XML Server.

The Tamino XML Server is robust, reliable, and scalable. It is used in mission critical environments and there is almost no failure and loss of data. It is reliable in sense it supports backup of data that can be stored in external devices or remote devices and used in clustered environments. The number of users can be increased and load on server can also be increased.