Changing makeup, multi-enterprise focus mark plant IT group's coming of age
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
This year's MESA International conference, with its Plant2Enterprise theme, saw a definite sea change in that organization, dedicated as it is to spreading the word about manufacturing execution systems (MES), a generic term for software systems that mediate between enterprise and plant-floor systems, as well as having their own specific functionality.
In past years, MESA board members tended toward representatives from an assortment of systems integrators and independent software vendors (ISVs). While the transition took place over the last several years, today the board includes representatives from Rockwell Software, Siemens, SAP, IBM, GE Fanuc, and Microsoft.
This is a natural development, given that a number of the original ISV MESA members ended up being acquired by the major automation vendors so well represented on the organization's board today. IT vendors recognize the plant floor as being a unique industry challenge and opportunity—a kind of final frontier, relatively speaking. Unlike, say, the banking industry, plant floors resist homogenization. Yet manufacturing is demonstrably an industry that responds well to efforts aimed at IT-driven productivity gain.
In any case, to Kevin Roach, MESA chairman and president of Rockwell Software, what was most important was the number of actual manufacturers—real technology users—that are now involved with MESA. "We had more than 80 end users at the conference, the most at any MESA event," says Roach. "And membership grew more than 183 percent in 2005."
To at least one frequent attendee to the conference, the cumulative effect of the changes was a conference permeated with a sense of purpose and seriousness that was perhaps lacking at prior events.
Also indicative of a key MES development is that so many of the user case studies presented involved an SAP enterprise system. Just as significant was that many involved multiplant rollouts, pointing to MES' increasing role as a tool for performance management in global manufacturing.
Paul E. Martin is CIO with Rexam PLC, said to be the fifth-largest consumer packaging manufacturer in the world. The MES initiative Martin described at the conference involves operations that supply more than 23 billion beverage cans per year, primarily to 10 major customers.
The execution initiative involved integration to the PLC level; radio-frequency scanning of held goods; and a dashboard facility for greater visibility into production. To date, says Martin, Rexam has saved more than $3.7 million across 17 plants based on better asset management as the means to reduce wasted product.
Cheryl Bogenschutz is CIO and David Klepak is chassis systems IT manager, ZF Group andZF Lemforder Corp. respectively. ZF is a $15-billion automotive supplier headquartered in Germany. The two talked about MES' role in delivering vehicle axles in sequence to automotive assemblers based on a three-hour window from order to ship—assuming no finished-goods inventory and hundreds of variant products.
"We were able to establish a global solution based on a standard architecture that was flexible enough to meet different customer needs," says Bogenschutz.
In the user presentations, as well as in other forums, many of the same themes related to execution systems seemed to arise again and again.
First and foremost was the relationship between IT and operations. As Bogenschutz points out, "Plants are now heavily dependent upon IT, and we can't be in a situation where IT represents a single point of failure across multiple plants."
Most of the discussions, though, concerned how the two functional areas could work together better. According to Martin, "There are turf wars between engineering and IT in any company. The secret is having clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and the influence of the steering committee."
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