Advice from the front line

"The advantage now is that each IBM manufacturing plant can notify the others of any quality issues that may arise,” says Colin Archibald, IBM Greenock’s manufacturing strategy manager. “It’s amazing how many similar quality problems all our plants experience. They could be supplier- or product-specific, but the important thing is that we now share this information with other sites before it becomes a problem for everyone. “Our overall product quality has improved dramatically. We’re a much leaner operation too, and we’ve saved millions of dollars in these areas alone over the past few years,” he adds. Archibald is IBM through and through. In 1988, after graduating in electrical engineering, he joined the company, initially in its shopfloor control systems group, then went on to work in test engineering at the Greenock site, eventually rising to senior lead engineer on PCs at the plant in 1993. In 1995, around the time when IBM changed its manufacturing style from one of traditional ‘push’ style mass production to one of configure-to-order, ‘pull’ manufacturing (with production being directly triggered by actual customer orders), Archibald became involved in a global initiative to standardise manufacturing and shopfloor data collection software. “Basically, I was responsible for developing and deploying our in-house software across a number of manufacturing sites in the Americas, Europe and the Far East. The software was developed to fully integrate with SAP [ERP], which is our primary production engine,” he explains. “Back in 1995, we tended to silo our software groups, typically fulfillment, production, planning, procurement and manufacturing... We [now] use SAP for fulfillment and production; i2 for supply chain planning; a range of in-house and off-the-shelf tools for procurement; and MEIT [manufacturing and engineering IT, a collective name for IBM’s shopfloor control software] for manufacturing.” Specifically on the manufacturing side, Archibald started work in 1998 to get a common set of floor control tools in all IBM’s manufacturing plants and to centralise the firm’s global software development activities in this area. He says it took two years to complete. The Greenock plant’s strategy was twofold. It wanted to create a single, front-end fulfilment engine to handle all orders placed on the site, coupled with separate, customised, unique SAP production engines for each Greenock product line (servers, PCs, laptops, etc). Archibald: “We get the order via telephone, web or fax. The information is passed to SAP’s fulfilment engine which then holds this information as a kind of pseudo-order. “Next, as the order information is passed down to the manufacturing software it splits up into four separate bills of material [BOMs]: one for the hardware configuration; one for software; one for language variations; and one for country details… Our legacy software then takes these four BOMs and dynamically merges them back together again.” The reason for doing this split-then-merge of the BOMs, says Archibald, is due to the sheer volume of data (he estimates 30,000 separate BOMs) that would have to reside in SAP to manage, update and control the orders. Once SAP has transferred the order information through to the legacy manufacturing software, it then sits awaiting release to the shop floor. First class VMI At this stage, the plant’s material execution (stock control/MRP) system pulls in the order information and calculates what materials and sub-assemblies are required for the order. Most of this material will come from local on-site inventory hubs. The Greenock site has an enormous self-contained, fully-automated warehouse that holds suppliers’ stock which is paid for only when it leaves the warehouse and goes to the production lines. It really is vendor-managed inventory (VMI) at its best. Once all the necessary materials and sub-assemblies have been brought together in kits awaiting release to the shop floor, the order information is also fed through to the firm’s ‘Factor’ (in-house developed) manufacturing scheduling software. This runs 24 hours a day and optimises production of all jobs through the plant. It takes into account order information, materials required for the job and capacity of the production lines, but is also flexible enough to allow certain jobs to be prioritised and routed faster through the shopfloor if for example, says Archibald, “it’s an important, direct customer order.” Next, the order information is released to the shopfloor. A kit of parts and sub-assemblies is built up. “In assembly, we decided the fastest way to get orders through the shopfloor was to give the assemblers only those work instructions that were considered unique for that job. They all know how to assemble the standard stuff, the floor control software delivers the necessary special instructions for each job via shopfloor terminals and a Java-based web tool,” says Archibald. “On their route through the shopfloor, all parts and sub-assemblies are barcoded and scanned at each workstation or assembly point. We know exactly where orders are and what our current stock situation is. It also helps us with traceability and quality issues. We always know which batch of parts was used for certain jobs and which supplier they came from.” Consistency of measurement has improved enormously across IBM’s plants as a result of using one common shop floor control system. “We used to have endless debates on how to best measure things. Individuals in every plant used to spend time working out assembly procedures and production measurement criteria. Now, we have one, centralised group of IBM people whose job it is to establish and define measurement criteria for the all the manufacturing plants. “Maybe the hardest thing to do in all of these re-engineering transformations is marrying the disparate requirements of business, operations and IT. You need to get the right people who can straddle all of these areas and find the right software. You must use the technology to your advantage without being led by it. You must understand where the business is driving and temper that with the day-to-day execution realities.” Any IBM senior manager can now access manufacturing and assembly information about any of IBM’s global production plants via a web-based business intelligence application (from Brio). “We hold daily production meetings where we can analyse reports and decide what corrective action we need to take on certain production lines.”