Getting manufacturing adaptive

Our mission for manufacturing industry is essentially to say, 'with Hewlett-Packard everything is possible'." So says Godfrey Jordan, HP's UK marketing manager for manufacturing. It's a grand claim, but dig around and its veracity is in the firm's own recent record. HP has an annual R&D budget of $4bn driving innovation. It's not long since the company completed the biggest merger in corporate history – that with Compaq – and stripped out $3bn of costs, including $1.55bn through supply chain improvements with SAP and effective IT consolidation. The firm also has 60 years experience in high tech manufacturing, and its German operation alone boasts one of the most advanced plants on wireless technologies. Indeed, this $70bn giant has notched up seriously successful IT infrastructure installation and management stories in engineering, manufacturing and research that are simply too numerous to mention. So it's impressive, it's got industrial strength heritage, it can and does push the boundaries – and with a scrupulous reputation for reliability, you can bet HP absolutely knows what it's talking about. Yet when it comes to the firm's 'adaptive enterprise' concept Jordan is disarmingly concerned about the potential for groans among industry's business leaders: who among the cynics needs yet another strategy? Particularly from the IT world. But he insists that in fact 'adaptive enterprise' is simple, pragmatic – and not only is it right for manufacturing in today's driven business climate, but we owe it our futures to listen up. "It starts with our 'best return on IT' initiative," he explains, "and our 'focused innovation' which are about providing innovative IT at a price our customers can afford. In an adaptive enterprise, IT power changes to reflect business computing demand and you pay only for what you use. It's effectively IT on a consumption-only model." Flexible and efficient Sounding good already? Compare that to today's reality, where silos of computing have evolved around departmental initiatives, with additions building on what becomes an increasingly expensive and inflexible infrastructure. "That's not efficient utilisation, it's hardly 'best return' and there are serious cost implications for essential integration," observes Jordan. And there's more. "CIOs today are facing a dual challenge. In the short term they've got to cut costs, lower headcount and standardise. But strategically they've got to be able to manage the impact of change, some of which they'll know about in advance, and some they won't – like mergers and acquisitions. So increasing agility is also about achieving cross-organisational business management and supporting that with flexible and scaleable IT. Manufacturers have to break away from the silo mentality to adaptive IT for an adaptive enterprise." Which is all well and good, but no-one can afford to move from their traditional IT model to this overnight. HP understands that, and its way of turning the vision into reality is centred on a practical roadmap. Jordan: "Our enterprise consulting arm and our partners typically go in and work with manufacturers to see where they are today and what are their requirements. We use three key measures. The first is speed at which they are capable of changing. The second is their range – the breadth of change they can accommodate. And the third is the effort required to get it done." That's the scoping, prioritising and reality check exercise. Then the goal is first ensuring that the existing environment is available, secure and performing adequately. Next you're into IT consolidation and integration down to a single or a few data centres – "and then conquering the costs at each location". Then it's service management, and the HP offering here is around its OpenView software tools – not only looking after network availability, but ensuring that applications are performing to spec right down at the desktop. Driving further down the adaptive enterprise road is where HP's 'pay per use' and virtualisation initiatives come in – with the best acknowledged example being at Philips Semiconductors in Nijmegen, Holland. Theo Smit, director, information and communications technology there, says: "The HP Utility data centre allows us to quickly and easily adapt to business fluctuations… We reduced our total cost of ownership by streamlining data centre management and reducing excess IT capacity while also incorporating the industry's best platform for data centre consolidation." Praise indeed. Says Jordan: "That has to resonate with manufacturers that are all too familiar with peaks and troughs. There's a huge amount to be said for being flexible and paying less if you're using less." Just to put some meat on those bones it's worth dipping into, say, storage. David Smith, HP's UK enterprise storage marketing manager, says: "Storage is very important because it's a well known area of business pain. The pressure is on to consolidate, and there are two key elements that apply: one is virtualisation; the other is the 'pay per use' model that underpins utility computing. They're both about doing a damned sight more with less." Virtualisation in storage Storage area networks (SANs) are the favoured technology – because they facilitate better utilisation as well as storage domain security and flexibility. Smith: "Direct attached storage (DAS) typically shows 50% utilisation, whereas with a SAN you can expect 70%. So after the up-front deployment cost we're seeing up to 400% ROI. And it enhances your ability to improve availability and scaleability. It's very much easier to add storage with a SAN array, and you can expect better uptime." If you go on to adopt HP's storage virtualisation technology, utilisation can go up to 85% – with applications getting precisely and only what they need rather than conventional 'best fit' chunks of space. "Then you also get facilities like online capacity expansion and firmware upgrades, as well as high availability and automatic load balancing – all of which feed into the adaptive enterprise concept." What about 'pay per use' in storage? Smith says it's already up and running at the BT Tower, for example, harnessing web-based metering technology on the high end arrays, with automated billing and the rest. This is the way to go.