Global ERP advances set stage for manufacturing operations orchestration

How globalization is impacting enterprise systems deployment is one thing, but what are the implications of global ERP for manufacturing operations?

“Manufacturers have turned their attention to lowering ERP cost of ownership through standardization on the one hand, and seeking further ERP value by pursuing competitive differentiation on the basis of sophisticated analytics and manufacturing intelligence,” says Paul Loftus, a managing partner in the North American industrial sourcing practice of Accenture.

The work being done is based on a new generation of industry standards—for Internet, Web services, and service-oriented architecture (SOA)—that make possible heightened levels of plant-floor systems integration, process flexibility, and inter-enterprise collaboration.

These standards are the means by which:

• Operations are managed not as isolated units of production and silos of information, but rather as the nexus of a web of real-time information, allowing optimized production based on known demand and secure supply; and
• Plant floors and the business enterprise establish bidirectional communication.

“Globalization and enterprise system maturation have led to a new approach to production and performance management,” says Mike Bradley, president of the Lake Forest, Calif.-based Wonderware business unit of Invensys. “The goal is for a company to truly say what it's capable of producing, and what its ability to put product on store shelves is.”

Improving productivity by integrating the output of diverse plant-floor systems often is referred to as enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI).

Boston-based AMR Research, in its recent publication, The Future of Enterprise Applications, says, “EMI is an emerging functional category that is of particular interest because it supports geographically dispersed supply network operations, bridging the gap between ERP and traditional, locally deployed, execution-oriented manufacturing operations.”

Supply network operations refers to the orchestration of manufacturing operations when the fleet of manufacturing sites is globally distributed and blended, including a mix of wholly owned and contract manufacturing assets.

Today, says Wonderware's Bradley, 14 brand-name manufacturers in the consumer goods, aerospace, electronics, and other industries are engaged in global rollouts of Invensys Wonderware Software Solutions, which are very much dedicated to orchestrating manufacturing operations, involving 356 production plants, and with individual rollouts encompassing as many as 50 plants.

Globalization has revealed major gaps in traditional manufacturing operations functionality, says AMR, including the need for “contextualization of real-time manufacturing performance across distributed sites,” supply sensing, master data management, and product genealogy.

This need for better manufacturing intelligence is a key driver in the emergence of production and performance management suites that have their own SOA-based infrastructure. This type of approach also is well-suited for multiplant engagements.

Within the last year, announcements related to Rockwell Software's Factory-Talk include the availability of ProductionCentre, FactoryTalk Integrator for enterprise connectivity, and FactoryTalk Portal for a single enterprise portal adapted to manufacturing—incorporating IBM WebSphere technology.

Invensys Wonderware and Invensys Process Systems both made use of the Invensys ArchestrA architecture in the development of the Wonderware Production and Performance Suite and the Invensys InFusion Enterprise Control System. In general, InFusion is better suited for continuous- and batch-process environments involving DCS-based control, while Wonderware Software Solutions support discrete manufacturing and batch operations that use PLCs and supervisory control systems.

Says Peter Martin, VP of strategic ventures at Invensys, “Almost every plant has different vendors' systems and equipment—even different vintages of the same systems. None tend to work together.” The situation must be addressed, Martin adds, because of the need to maximize the economic value of industrial assets and the volatile nature of supply and demand in the global economy.

It's not always necessary to have a fully integrated set of software solutions to achieve better manufacturing intelligence in global operations. Other kinds of solutions are more tactical in nature, using Internet technologies to gather data from disparate plant-floor systems. Aggregation and analysis of the resulting information—delivered in near-real time as key performance indicators (KPI)—allows for quick reactions in dynamic environments, including changes in demand coming down from ERP systems.

One particular example highlights some of the complexities that can arise in moving to what amounts to a new business model. At Sika Sarnafil, a Swiss waterproofing-systems manufacturer with U.S. facilities in Canton, Mass., its shop-floor data collection system recently transitioned from batch to real-time data connectivity with the SAP enterprise system using SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (xMII).

Previously, says Plant Manager Greg Scheidemantel, the SAP ERP platform—running on a data center in Germany—received updates from the shop-floor data collection system just once a day. “While network outages and system crashes happened from time to time, they didn't affect our ability to perform,” he says.

But those outages became a larger issue once near-real time, two-way information exchange with the SAP backbone at corporate headquarters in Switzerland was established. Sika Sarnafil has since acquired a fault-tolerant server from Stratus Technologies that is connected on a “store-and-forward” basis to the core SAP instance in Germany.

“To be truly effective, applications like xMII need very high availability,” notes Frank Hill, a worldwide director with Stratus. “Fault-tolerant hardware provides that availability at remote sites where there isn't a deep IT infrastructure.”