Manufacturing systems set to take centre stage again

IT for improving plant and shopfloor operations is starting to see a resurgence as manufacturers realise their limitations of years of underinvestment. That will be among key messages at MESA’s (the international Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association) Plant2Enterprise conference in the US later this month. Keynote speaker Colin Masson, research director for supply network operations at analyst AMR, believes that following a sustained emphasis on supply chain systems, interest is now rising in manufacturing performance. “Every plant has different shopfloor systems, and multi-site manufacturers have no visibility [of them],” he observes. Which makes supply chain streamlining and optimisation difficult, particularly with the drive to make and specify product anywhere for any geography. “So the next step is to put co-ordination and analysis in place so they can see cycle times and share best practice,” says Masson. Hence the interest in, for example, scheduling systems and what he calls ‘enterprise manufacturing intelligence’ – dashboards that sift data from the shopfloor or MESs (manufacturing execution systems) for business use, exception management and the rest. A couple of outcomes are likely to include more corporate level decision making around investment in shopfloor systems, and a move to place more aspects of MES functionality within ERP systems. “Some of the higher level [MES] functionality needs to move to the enterprise level – for example, recipe and PLM coverage,” says Masson. As for identifying which functions, he agrees that it’s difficult to generalise – requiring plant-by-plant, business-by-business analysis. But he points to AMR’s REPAC (ready, execute, process, analyse, co-ordinate) model of what constitutes broad MES functionality (which maps to the Supply Chain Council’s SCOR model) as the best route to working this out.