Locations
Locations represent the physical or logical areas within a manufacturing site where production, storage or inspection activities take place. The location hierarchy is built in a tree structure that provides an easy way to structure your plants digitally.
A location can represent a plant, a building, production hall, line, cell, work station or storage area.
Location Hierarchy
- Enterprise: Top level for the organization (not visible in the other applications)
- Plant: Name, description, code, time zone
- Area: sub-division with name, description
- Production line: Name, description, code, barcode
- Production cells: Name, description, code, barcode
- Warehouse: Name, description, code, barcode
- row: Name, description, code, barcode
- Bin location: Name, description, code, barcode
Description is what will be shown towards the operators and what can be localized. Name needs to be unique.
The principles of both UNS & ISA-95 structure are used to make the hierarchy.
The core manufacturing side (Enterprise → Plant → Area → Line → Cell) is a textbook ISA-95 Level 0–4 hierarchy. The warehouse branch is a practical extension. ISA-95 distinguishes between physical assets (equipment) and logical groupings (areas, sites). Mantsu's 'Area' being a pure sub-division without a code or barcode reflects that correctly: it's a logical grouping, not an operable unit.
In a UNS, the topic namespace typically follows the ISA-95 hierarchy as the path structure:
Why does it matter?
- Clear, consistent representation of real-world layout
- Used in other applications like Order cockpit, Downtimes and Lists
- Barcode & code support → easy system integration
- Full traceability → know who changed what, when
- Scales with complex manufacturing sites