Friday, November 6, 2009

Curbing MESsy Shop Floor State of Affairs – Part I

Those that follow manufacturing-oriented enterprise applications have likely noticed for some time an uptick of conversations about the need to better integrate high-speed manufacturing operations (the real-time world of the plant) with the planning and engineering departments (the transactional and design world of enterprise systems). The nirvana (or utopia) hoped for thus far has been to provide a single point of operation and control for manufacturers to: Plan, Define, Control, Execute, and Analyze Production.

Why do we need integrated manufacturing operations, or manufacturing execution systems (MES) linked to transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, likely via some plant-level integration hub and visualization & intelligence layer?

Well, it is not a major revelation to say that, for instance, in the discrete manufacturing sector, fabrication and assembly processes are being run and managed by isolated applications, such as “Post-it” notes, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, Microsoft Access databases, and a plethora of niche vendor’s plant applications (point solutions like data historians). This creates an overwhelming number of individual silos (or islands) of manufacturing data and operations.

These silos are typically not connected to enterprise-level (“ivory tower”) systems like ERP, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and so on. This lack of integration and real-time connection then all too often results in huge operational inefficiencies, lost productivity, wasted time and materials, sub-par products, and so on.

Consequently, major decisions in the offices are based on theory and hunch rather than on actual and actionable data. But instead of traditionally managing operations “in the dark”, companies should rather strive to capitalize on all of the operational opportunities coming from the following sources: people, processes, and the plant equipment.

ERP Does It… Not!

Some might logically wonder whether ERP systems can take care of this (and why not, if that is the case). Well, at best, the core ERP systems’ functional scope only provides a financial and inventory snapshot of how a manufacturer is performing. Core ERP systems cannot tell users what is happening on the manufacturing floor right now (at this instant). Ironically however, what is happening at this moment impacts the financial performance later.

To be more illustrative, ERP is good at producing a forecasted demand plan by decision makers, and giving answers to sales, purchasing, and manufacturing orders’ inquiries like “What?”, “When?”, “For whom?”, and “At what cost?” Conversely, MES is good at providing the record of production that is supplied by plant operators (e.g., engineers, supervisors, machinists, etc.), who thereby inadvertently turn into mere data collectors.

The execution system is able to provide answers to the questions like “What are the schedule changes?”, “What is the product build history?”, “When will it be done?”, “How is the product quality?”, and “Where is the batch?”, but without any awareness of the customer (the particular order for that customer) or the particular order costs. In a nutshell, MES systems are devoid of any customer- and order-related information.

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