Plant integration: the time is now

Integration is hardly a new subject: it’s been a thorny issue almost for as long as I’ve been covering manufacturing business and control systems. It’s also complicated – by the fact that ‘integration’ means different things to different people. One of the big educational issues for UK industry and the vendors of integration software and services is this difference in understanding – split essentially between those dealing with business IT and manufacturing itself: actually making things or stuff. At the business enterprise level, application and departmental (even inter-site) integration – and the justification for it – is contested but at least well understood and readily sanctioned by management teams throughout manufacturing. But when it comes to plant/factory floor to business integration – which we are addressing here – to date the above observations have certainly not been the case. Nevertheless, in the last couple of years especially, this latter level of integration has become more of an openly talked-about issue: it’s being seen as more of a problem that needs to be dealt with, and now can. Why? Because on the one hand there is a new and accelerating driver – the Internet, and the expectations of real time trading in the ‘e’ world. And on the other, standards are fast emerging, thanks mainly to Microsoft adopters, that make sensor to boardroom integration easier and less expensive. Dealing with the first point, it’s all about ordering on the web, forming supply networks of manufacturers collaborating over the web, promising production and all the rest. And getting results not in days, weeks or months, but in ‘Internet time’. This is what will push businesses to get integrating their systems – the imperative to be part of the new order. Earlier this year, Ford US informed journalists around the world that its Oracle- and Cisco-powered web AutoXchange (now the big automotive vendors’ Covisint trading inititiative) had performed the first ever Internet reverse auction (competing supply chains bidding for contracts) – an order for $78 million worth of engine production parts. Ford said it saved itself “double digit dollars”. And the point is that the deal was struck on the web in minutes – not hours, days, or even weeks: minutes. Nicholas Sheele, president of Ford Europe and chairman of the DTI’s Manufacturing 2020 panel in the Government’s Foresight initiative, says ‘the Internet Revolution’ will be “the catalyst and prime enabler for the most radical change in manufacturing since the industrial revolution.” And this is the point: as Andy Chatha, president of manufacturing IT analyst ARC, said at his London e-manufacturing forum late in January: this speed of business demands a very different scale of performance from companies’ IT – not just their business IT, but also their manufacturing IT. “Complexity is going up, time available down and speed up, because of the web … [but] it can lower the cost of doing business by 20 to 30%. That’s why everyone’s so excited about it. Everything is set for change, and manufacturing must plan now to change with it to reap the benefits.” Clearly, businesses will need to think and operate – that’s to say assess their capacity, bid profitably and produce – faster. And that means they’ll need slicker, more integrated business and manufacturing IT. The web is a world of quoting, promising and making to order quickly and efficiently across constantly shifting internal and external ‘supply and make’ networks. And hence the loose term ‘e-manufacturing’: integrating real-time plant information with business systems and up into web-connected supply chains. When recently I interviewed one of giant Internet firm Oracle’s senior directors, Lou Unkeless, on this subject, he conceded that in saying manufacturers should be prioritising getting into the ‘e’ world, the assumption is that the manufacturing is itself “lean and mean”. Which means: it’s communicating its status in real time to the enterprise systems that are going ‘e’-wards. Why? So that planning and scheduling knows what’s happening now in terms of production, maintenance, whatever – not just what the model says should have happened. Also, so purchasing knows the real world of inventory usage; so finance knows actual invoicable production and activity-based costs; and so sales can automatically accept, negotiate or configure manufacturing deals based on real capacity and achievable profitability. And so on. And, of course, it’s not: in most of British industry this is simply not the case. Oracle’s man said, quite rightly, that although manufacturers must look beyond their four walls to get onto ‘e’ – actually they could get a full “50-90% improvement by reviewing the IT inside the four walls associated directly with the manufacturing itself”. And we come back to it: although for some that means investing in better than the old MRP II systems, notably with the new wave of advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems, it also has to mean getting the factory integrated with the enterprise. According to Unkeless, the new world “requires you to completely change the way you think about and execute within the four walls. [You need] no penalty for set-ups and tear-downs, no inflexible batch sizes, and cycle times right down. You need new eyes for manufacturing.” Chatha agrees: “You’ve got to cut down cycle times. What you need is a unified architecture: you can’t continue to function as a bunch of [separate] departments. You have to share information in real time for e-business.” And Ralph Schneider of SAP, also speaking at ARC’s forum, said: “Plants need to be a responsive element in the supply chain too. They become a very important part.” Simon Bragg, enterprise systems research manager at ARC, puts it another way: “If you want to react to customer events and swiftly pull out an optimum plan, you have to have accurate plant data – and that means coming from the shop floor in near real time, or real time.” It’s about JIT (just-in-time) all the way: the antithesis of make-to-stock, or even make to forecast. And there you have it. The good news is that with standards, it’s getting easier. There are new and powerful forms of system ‘glue’ (what we used to term middleware – generalised interfacing technology tools that enable different systems to talk to one another). Microsoft’s DNA (distributed Internet architecture) for Manufacturing, last month renamed and relaunched as Manufacturing.net is effectively a major software infrastructure standard. It specifically addresses the needs of manufacturers, in terms of robustness, data rates and connectivity, and embraces the underlying technologies of COM and DCOM, which are already well supported by the industrial community. And the bottom line is that it and the other, mostly Microsoft technologies are dragging the hitherto proprietary world of process control and machine automation IT kicking and screaming into the mainstream ‘open’ IT arena. I listened with interest earlier this year to Steve Rubin, president and CEO of SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software vendor Intellution, launching his company’s iVisualize factory floor human machine interface system. It’s just an HMI, but it’s special because it’s based on Windows CE – the small, high power, diskless ‘instant-on’ and ‘open’ operating system for the factory floor. Intellution aren’t the first here: Siemens has been selling its Windows CE-based HMIs and contollers for about 18 months. But the point is that by offering CE-based solutions, OEMs and system integrators get their hands on an open, scaleable, eminently supportable and lower cost devices. And, most importantly, with easy and standard links for integration up to ERP systems, it fits with manufacturing’s need to focus back on the factory floor, and ‘close the loop’ with the business systems. Here’s an obvious route for starting to get better bi-directional communications and – with the right workflow – make entirely customer-driven, better, more profitable and less wasteful use of shop floor and plant capacity. Rubin hopes his Windows CE HMIs will be installed “on every machine, not just at the end of lines”. And he makes the valid point that “once the CE platforms are in place, adding, say, logic control is not much of a stretch.” Again, it’s another step on the road to getting plant and machines more easily integrated so knowledge flows around them, up to the business and out to the supply chains in near real time – making for the economies and efficiencies of JIT operations and flexible, agile and responsive manufacturing. Rubin is unequivocal: “Investment in the supply chain needs to be equal in amount to the funds spent making the plant flexible, or a bottleneck will ensue.” Arch rival Wonderware’s Roy Slavin, president and CEO, sings from the same hymn sheet. His says plants and supply chains can’t respond at Internet speed because of the high spend on ERP and the consequent low-balling on plant IT. He goes further, majoring on the need to empower plant and machine operators themselves for e-business. He insists that while the concept of bridging the ERP/shopfloor divide is correct, it’s not enough. Operators, he says, need information too – and he recommends hand-helds and thin client devices as the practical way forward, so that, crucially, they can be responsive and play their part in making agile manufacturing work. Sounds reasonable? Yes, but what specifically should you be doing? First up is facing down the quite different perspectives and imperatives of mainstream IT people (and the business people they serve), and manufacturing operations’ engineers and technicians. Paul Horrell, director of business development at enterprise and simulation software vendor AspenTech’s refineries business unit, puts it exactly. “There is still a disconnect between planners, schedulers, control engineers, optimisation teams, engineering and operations.” This has to change. Second is to understand the limitations of your existing systems – and what that translates into. ERP systems just haven’t been designed to provide high-level visibility of real time data, driven from the factory floor. So you need something extra: because decisions about what to do about plant break-downs or job sequences shouldn’t be being made in isolation on the shop floor. Phil Hall, formerly a director of technology at process-centric MES (manufacturing execution systems – a dreadful and virtually meaningless acronym that attempts to generalise the operational/business link with the focus on maximising profit) vendor Synchromatic (now in administrative receivership), says: “Effective communication with the shop floor is essential. It won’t be obvious on the shop floor to someone coming on shift why they should suddenly make changes to what’s going to go onto a machine next, or which pallets to use, for example.” And he adds: “What’s right for that order may not be right in the global view. The system has to understand what stage the process is at, the current supply chain situation, and perform analysis to develop strategic plans for the best way forwards.” Tony Prylowski, ceo of enterprise data acquisition software vendor Automsoft, cites a brewery high speed kegging plant example. “Turning around the kegs and getting them out of the door is what drives that plant’s profitability,” he says. “Everything else is secondary to kegging for them, so if there’s a problem with one of the filling heads, the business needs to know fast because it affects the bottom line.” Hall: “You have to make very well informed decisions in the face of complex, constraint-based routings, and the result needs to be implemented very quickly on the shop floor. And that means you have to compromise – when you’re working in a time frame of minutes, you can’t engage a two-hour MRP run. Your MES has to work out what to do next – but within reason.” What we’re talking about here is enterprise MES territory. “This is the bit that counts,” says Hall. And he adds that spending another 20% of the cost of ERP on the industry-specific MES and some integration, and a fraction of the time and resource, “unlocks another 40% of benefits.” Rob Turner, lead consultant in ICI Eutech’s control and information management group, says: “The key is getting information [from the systems] and serving that back out to the organisation so they don’t have to wait to the end of the day, week or month.” It’s all about closing the loop: managing the selling, ordering, planning, production and shipping cycle better. The prize is: more efficient use of capacity through better visibility from planning and scheduling; cutting the impact of tear-down and build-up operations; bottleneck detection and elimination; inventory reduction; and quality improvements. Then there’s lead times down, the ability to optimise production processes to match real orders, get supply chains more efficient and agile. And more profit. John Gallagher, who’s the group technical manager for manufacturing systems at Nestle UK, summed it up at that ARC conference. He said that “although engineering and IS don’t understand one another, manufacturers must get them talking”. We have to rethink our business processes, reflecting the different perceptions, needs and what is sustainable in different departments – including the factory floor.” Gallagher’s advice was: “Don’t integrate unless you have to, but you will have to more than you know.”