About recipes

A recipe (also known as a process recipe) defines the settings used by equipment and machines on a production line to process materials and produce products and assemblies consistently. Complex, automated manufacturing machines often have a built-in recipe editor where recipe programs can be created, saved, and selected. Simpler machines and equipment might have settings for speed, time, or temperature that can be entered and adjusted. A process engineer typically specifies these equipment/machine settings as the Process Of Record (POR) for a given product on a given line.

When a production line is being prepared to run a specific product, recipe settings must be set up on the equipment. This can be a time consuming and tedious task and prone to mistakes if the settings aren't set correctly. Even if a recipe program is selected on a machine, the settings in that recipe might have been adjusted for maintenance or another reason and might not be valid for the product being produced now, resulting in errors and/or additional time to reset the settings for the current production run. For machines that can run many different products with each product requiring different machine settings, the need to manage recipes is essential.

What is recipe management?

Recipe management accommodates the variations commonly found in a given manufacturing process, reducing the effort required to manage different product formulations and parametric settings on production equipment and automated machines.

FactoryLogix recipe management features allow you to consistently organize a unique set of parameters necessary to set up a machine or process and/or to identify a specific recipe file defining those settings.

Examples of recipes used in a manufacturing process:

• Oven-related (baking/curing/reflow): Temperature settings at each zone and conveyor speed

• Fastening bolts (torque driver settings): Foot-pounds or newton-meters and number of rotations per each fastening point

• Injection molding: Time, temperature, force

• Functional test/firmware programming: Use of a specific file (binary, text, XML, etc.)

In FactoryLogix, recipe management scope is intended to define the settings used for equipment supporting a manufacturing process, not the “ingredients”. Its scope does not typically extend to material requirements and the overall work performed, which along with the recipes are defined entirely in the system’s process revisions.

Recipe management is particularly useful in "personalized order" environments where custom products and assemblies are produced using specific values and settings found in a recipe and known as batch attributes in FactoryLogix. Once recipes are defined in the FactoryLogix system, shop floor operators are presented with the exact data they require to produce a product or assembly accurately. As products and assemblies change over time, FactoryLogix recipe management capabilities allow administrators to update recipe data quickly, avoiding costly delays.