The unified plant: from industry-specific ERP to Manufacturing 2.0

Having a manufacturing system with a near-real time grasp of operations means a lot more to Carl Morris than measuring point efficiencies. For Morris, president of Injection Technology Corp. (ITECH), the goal is to track the true costs of operations, and manage order fulfillment.

At its 30,000-square-foot facility in Arden, N.C., ITECH makes custom plastic parts and enclosures found in goods such as fish finders and electric meters. With the price of plastic rising, and customers insisting on timely deliveries, true costs must be known.

“If you don't have a system for accurately tracking your costs, you're going to go under,” Morris asserts. For more than 11 years, ITECH used an ERP system that was competent at carrying out several enterprise functions, but lacked real-time monitoring of plant operations and quality. But when the ERP system began to lag, ITECH looked at other options, settling on the EnterpriseIQ suite from IQMS. Now ITECH uses nearly every module of the suite—including real-time production monitoring and graphical scheduling to bring together the functions needed to run the plant floor.

Morris says he knows of other manufacturers that have implemented ERP, but still run their plants using whiteboards and spreadsheets. “You end up not knowing what your real costs are,” he says. “The days when you can run a factory out of your shirt pocket are gone.”

Manufacturers of all sizes are looking for a more unified approach to operations management applications, notes Colin Masson, a director with Boston-based AMR Research. But vendors haven't offered a single application suite capable of supporting execution and intelligence functions across all industries or modes of manufacturing.

While Masson concedes that manufacturing execution system (MES) solutions have been successful in a few verticals, the functionality needed for unified manufacturing operations management has not been as easy to “genericize” as processes at the ERP level.

But Masson does see an evolution toward what AMR calls “Manufacturing 2.0” functionality in which a layer of software orchestrates enterprise processes with events generated by existing plant applications. “We're seeing this idea of having a manufacturing composition environment, just like we're seeing the ERP suite vendors address the concept of a business composition environment,” he says.

Having a more unified plant applications approach could help manufacturers arrive at the type of visibility and responsiveness they need to meet customer expectations.

Unfortunately, there's no single applications suite or even approach to plant operations management suitable to the diversity of manufacturing styles, equipment, and levels of automation across all enterprises.

A manufacturing-savvy ERP solution might be suitable for some companies, especially if they don't require a real-time tie to PLCs and other process automation. Similarly, says Masson, some companies find that an enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) solution with a dashboard view of performance gives them the visibility they seek without a full-blown MES. So while various types of applications vendors are addressing the issue of unified plant management, multiple trends are involved:

• A manufacturing composition environment that supports process orchestration, workflow, and alerting;
• Vendors in the MES space adding some of this composition environment, moving their solution sets into the realm of operations process management; and
• EMI vendors adding workflow capabilities to their dashboards, making their solutions more actionable and capable of light execution.

ITECH gains a unified approach to plant management by using the IQMS suite for everything from inventory management and financials to shop-floor scheduling and production monitoring. One important element, says Morris, is keeping current on bills of material (BOM), which drive other system functions such as scheduling and costing. Morris says users maintain the BOM structures, while operators use wireless scan tools from Symbol to input material data to the system. The operators also input a limited amount of data, such as downtime codes, into the system via PCs.

“The system has everything we need, but like any software application, it's a matter of 'Garbage in, Garbage out,' so you need some discipline in its use,” says Morris. “If you have BOMs built correctly, and your people enter reject and downtime codes correctly, you end up with some good information that helps you manage the business.”

With ITECH's previous ERP system, there was no real-time, integrated materials measurement, nor were there regular data feeds from the injection molding machines. The IQMS system enables integrated measurement, getting updates every 15 seconds from machinery. The system also supports paperless execution with online work instructions and order information all accessed via PCs on the shop floor. These online operator instructions, when combined with the graphical scheduling tools and production and quality reports, deliver a unified view of operations.

“We know when we have parts ready to ship, or how much longer it's going to take to complete an order,” says Morris. “IQMS improved our profitability because by knowing our exact inventory levels, we aren't under- or overbuying material. And by having the correct BOMs, we know exactly how many parts to produce, and we know the expected scrap based on history. Plus, if we need to run a job that could be run on three or four machines, the software will tell us on which machine it runs the best, based on [factors] such as reject and cycle-time trends.”

Enterprise manufacturing intelligence software has taken off largely because it lends a view of performance independent of underlying MES or supervisory systems, says Masson. The new trend with EMI vendors is to add workflow and alerting.

Eddy Azad, president and CEO of Parsec Automation, agrees that EMI needs to be more actionable. To this end, he says, Parsec has added alerting capabilities, as well as a “logic engine,” to its TrakSYS suite, which allows users to add context to disparate sources of plant and enterprise data that overlap during operations. “You have to bring [in] all sources of data, and find ways to streamline the relevance of certain pieces of data from these different sources,” he says.

Avery Dennison's Graphics and Reflective Products division uses TrakSYS as part of its Six Sigma and Lean methods. The company's Mt. Prospect, Ill.-based plant, which makes reflective materials used for traffic signs and safety stripes, began rolling out the TrakSYS performance management solution in early 2007.

TrakSYS integrates with process data coming from production machinery via the tagged data stream provided by InTouch supervisory control software from Wonderware. TrakSYS takes in this real-time data originating from the machinery and PLCs to monitor events such as downtime, says Nishad Parmar, production leader and a Lean Sigma black belt with Avery Dennison.

“We monitor our performance and our downtime—whether it's planned or unplanned—and understand where significant events are occurring, how they are occurring, and their frequency,” says Parmar. “This information helps us decide where to focus our attention as part of Six Sigma.”

When trended over time, adds Parmar, reports from TrakSYS reveal likely areas for further improvement.

For instance, with a set-up reduction project, TrakSYS can show trends for which shifts, operators, pieces of equipment, and materials were involved. Based on this analysis, certain people might be pulled into a Kaizen event to analyze adjustments to procedures—e.g., where to locate tools—that might shave time from the set-up procedure. “We can get the right people into a focus group, and then devise and implement an improvement project,” says Parmar.

Most observers agree that whatever route is taken to unified plant management—MES with strong process orchestration, an EMI package with light execution, or an ERP system with strong plant monitoring—the end solution needs to be easily configurable. Claus Abildgren, a marketing program manager for Wonderware, which is part of Invensys, says the Invensys ArchestrA architecture allows a unified plant data model on top of which the various plant applications sit.

The applications in turn can interact with business process management engines such as Microsoft's BizTalk to support critical information flows.

“There are two fundamental information flows that need to be managed,” says Abildgren. “There's the plan-to-action flow, which is the production management flow that involves what and how much to make; and the performance management flow, which involves information on what is actually occurring on the floor.”

According to AMR's Masson, composition management engines for Manufacturing 2.0 might come from Microsoft or SAP, or from vendors with an execution background such as Eyelit and Apriso.

At the end of the day, he concludes, such an environment must be easy to use. “It's about making a fundamental transformation to a composition environment that takes advantage of the services in existing systems, but allows users to orchestrate them in a much more dynamic way.”