Simon Jacobson: 21st century conceptual framework; 20th century technology base

AMR Research sees evidence of "Manufacturing 2.0" in steps being taken to capitalize on service- and collaboration-based architectures to allow dynamic reconfiguring of sensor and mobile worker-supported supply networks, in support of lean, on-demand production.

As a concept backed by a number of emerging technologies, Manufacturing 2.0 is appearing just as 20 years of minimal manufacturing investments are being addressed. While the manufacturing execution system (MES) market broke the $1B barrier in 2005, that same year software buyers spent more than $15B on core ERP software.

Given the underinvestment, at present we have an installed base of manufacturing applications meant to support yesteryear's make-to-stock scenarios. MES solutions—most of which are optimized for single-site manufacturing—typically only support a narrow range of manufacturing styles found in the industry from which the solution arose.

New architectures and approaches are needed to orchestrate emerging supply-network composite applications with the narrowly focused and site-specific manufacturing services that traditional MES and other manufacturing operations software applications must provide.

Many manufacturing processes are still prohibitively expensive to fully automate with hardware-based sensors and actuators for closed-loop production control, particularly if the manufacturing process is continuously reconfigured or adapted for new products—or as part of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma initiatives. Rather than ripping out legacy investments and force-fitting manufacturing applications, some newer approaches to managing manufacturing complexity have been more successful.

These approaches use the business process management tools and federated data management approach traditionally used in high-volume transaction processing, and involve the most valuable asset of manufacturing: people.

While Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 magic aligns with Manufacturing 2.0—especially for managing the human capital elements—the supporting technology is really Manufacturing service-oriented architecture (SOA). Enterprise SOA is still in its infancy, yet the promise of Manufacturing SOA is real, and manufacturing services have evolved in the absence of complete standards and manufacturing master data management (MDM) strategies.

Manufacturing SOA demands a services-enablement layer to be leveraged for defining events and services, the management and orchestration of those services, and the synthesis of information for the purposes of performance visualization and analytics.

AMR's Manufacturing 2.0 framework includes these three elements:

• Operations event/activity monitoring;
• Operations process management; and
• Operations intelligence.

In addition to the services enablement layer, an operations services bus also is needed to broker communications functions between legacy applications—e.g., MES and CMMS systems—and service-based composite applications. While the role sounds similar to that of an Enterprise Service Bus, the enterprise class will struggle to keep up with the volumes and speed required for manufacturing.