Culture wars
Can the plant floor and IT bridge the language gap and learn to love each other?
By Nancy Bartels, senior editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
One of the biggest challenges facing many manufacturers today has nothing to do with either their customers or products. It's culture—teaching plant-floor and IT personnel to work and play well together.
Time was, it didn't matter if the two ever talked except at the company picnic. The plant-floor folks had their systems, IT had theirs, and that was that.
Not anymore.
In the last few years, IT has gotten interested in what's going on down in operations, and vice versa, and that interest has raised some hackles on both sides.
Packaged software applications and PCs already are ubiquitous on factory floors. More recently, manufacturing system vendors have introduced plant-floor IT architectures that connect multiple systems. These systems are, by and large, Microsoft Windows-based. Windows has always belonged to IT, but the operations folks are the ones who have to use the systems—and they still are responsible for getting product out the door.
The greatest return on the millions of dollars spent on enterprise systems comes when those applications are fed by factory-floor data. That means connecting to systems that have been the exclusive property of production, but IT usually is called upon to make the connection.
While safety and security are enterprise concerns, in the post-9/11 world, the issue has taken on new urgency. Enterprisewide system security traditionally has been the responsibility of IT, but plant-floor safety and security has been the domain of operations.
Unfamiliarity also is a problem. Bob Hausler, a VP with industrial software vendor ABB, explains that the plant floor is being forced to "migrate to a more IT-based infrastructure. They've had closed systems for a long time and are comfortable with them. Now they're being asked to connect to IT, and they don't even know what questions to ask."
Anybody see a recipe here for misunderstanding and turf wars?
The language gap
Like many cultural misunderstandings, this one begins with a language gap.
In IT, "real time" can mean anything better than batch processing done at the end of the day. A five-minute lag is trivial. On the factory floor, "real time" often is measured in milliseconds. Anything longer is unacceptable.
In IT parlance, "just reboot the system" describes a simple way to do a quick fix. The same phrase causes either horrified looks or derisive laughter in operations, where stopping a line or a batch process can mean millions of dollars in losses.
Manufacturing and IT see things differently.
"The IT focus and mentality is completely different from that of operations," says Dick Slansky, senior analyst at ARC Advisory Group, Dedham, Mass. "Operations runs a manufacturing production process that is on a schedule. The run is in real time and in sequence. It's just not interruptible. The mindset of IT is that if something goes down, we'll figure out what to do to fix it. We'll have it up tomorrow. That doesn't play on the plant floor."
"IT wants to look at things from a data standpoint," explains Clark Swain, senior VP at Nimbus Partners,a software developer and integrator for the pharmaceutical industry. "The plant floor doesn't think about data, but real objects. They talk different languages," he says.
"Security" also means different things to IT and operations, and can be Ground Zero for conflict.
Particularly in process industry operations, an uncontrolled shutdown raises issues of physical and environmental safety, and security means controlling those processes—something that IT doesn't always grasp.
"IT's mandate has been to protect the computer and the data," explains Kevin Staggs, a control systems solution planner for Honeywell Industry Solutions. "They don't really understand control systems and that the primary responsibility is safety."
These misunderstandings lead to a "holy war" that breaks out when the word comes down from the executive suite to connect the control layer to the enterprise systems, he adds.
IT deals every day with outside threats to business applications. They believe they—not operations—are best qualified to deal with these threats, says Staggs. But the control engineers also are confident of their own ability to handle operations security. "They know the business systems are under attack, and they see it as a threat to safety," explains Stagg. "They can't shut down and reboot every time there is an attack."
Turf wars
But the crux of the issue—as with most wars—is power and money. Who gets to say what solutions will be used? Whose budget is the money going to come from? Where will the final authority lie?
Peace will be made on a case-by-case basis, but in the end, IT and operations will have to learn to work together. It makes too much economic sense for them not to.
"What companies will eventually have to do is sit down at a senior-management level and say to both sides, 'Play nice'," says Slansky. "Computing and manufacturing are linked and can't do without one another."
Exactly what the final balance of power will look like is hard to tell, but some trends are emerging. At first glance, IT may be winning the war.
"The overall trend is for IT and operations to get closer together," says Matt Bauer, director of manufacturing execution systems (MES) marketing at Rockwell Automation. "The natural curve is that as Web services, Microsoft .NET, and other elements are embedded and embraced by the manufacturing side of the house, operations will become more dependent on IT."
IT also is credited with driving the advance. "There is a huge demand to tie IT and plant systems together," says Kevin Tock, a VP at plant-floor architecture vendor Wonderware. "The IT people usually win."
But the operations team usually has the final say." Operations has to own this in the end," says Bauer. "They're the people with the business problem—how do I maximize my assets? How do I achieve manufacturing excellence?"
Nimbus Partners' Swain concurs, stating, "Any automation project needs to be operations-led. The operations guys are the ones who understand how the business is run. The rigor they bring is to ask the question, Will this work? Will it save me time and money? Will my people use it?"
The solution providers initially may be the mediators in these battles. Frequently they are the "neutral" third party in the room when initial buying decisions are made, and the vendor presentation may be the first time the two sides have ever dealt with each other. "I can name 10 different customer meetings where the IT and process people had never been in the same room together before," says Tock.
"We're in the middle in this holy war. We can work in both domains," says Honeywell's Stagg, adding that often the security issue is the one driving détente. "Everybody realizes that if there's a breach, it's an everybody-loses situation. We can no longer afford turf wars. We're trying to do everything we can to supply both sides."
"The best way to get this done is through real collaboration," says Kevin Bernier, director of plant intelligence for GE Fanuc."We talk with our customers about whether, and how, IT and manufacturing are collaborating."
In its own manufacturing operation, GE Fanuc has started the Manufacturing Digitization Council. Driven by IT, its members meet weekly to develop a common ground between IT and manufacturing. The goal is to develop a single infrastructure that both can use.
What's happened in some companies is emergence of a new IT/operations model—a blend of the two departments and skill sets—a "manufacturing IT" group that is intimately familiar with the manufacturing process, yet understands and supports all the IT-oriented systems.
"I see a consolidation of manufacturing and other IT folks, with specialists managing parts of it, and everyone on the same technology or infrastructure," says Bernier. He adds that a specialist who can bring process improvement skills in disciplines such as Six Sigma and Lean would be especially valuable. "We're going to see people with a blend of all three of these skills. They're the people needed to drive efficiencies."
Concludes Bauer, "The companies that see that they can eliminate the silos are the most successful in terms of how they information-enable their operations. They will take what used to be called 'plant IT' to the next level and combine the skill sets and capabilities of IT and blur the lines to make a new kind of organization. A forward-looking organization will embrace this."
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