Network under-investment is fundamentally limiting manufacturing improvement

Manufacturers’ boards of directors are still over-investing in enterprise scale applications like ERP, but drastically under-investing in the network hardware, systems and services on which they are supposed to run. And this is a serious contributory factor to the ongoing incidence of problematic and/or failed implementations. So says Cisco operations director for the manufacturing and services sectors John Donovan. He believes that senior execs in industry still mostly perceive their networks as ‘plumbing’, a utility, or alternatively ‘black art’ IT that is infinitely capable and anyway secondary to applications and application integration in the data sense. “They think it’s just the plumbing. It’s not; it’s intelligence, security, bandwidth, services…” Cisco, he says, comes across many implementations that prove the point. “Pilot projects are run up and successful, but then when they go for roll out the systems fall over because they haven’t investigated the networks requirement,” he says. And the same applies to network management software and services. The truth of his statements is littered across the whole of manufacturing. There are implementations we are aware of that have been set back many months due exactly to this fact. Investment in appropriate WAN (wide area network) technology and the rest is invariably late and minimised, since it’s unbudgeted. As a result, time scales suffer, training budgets are cut, and yet again, IT projects get a bad name. Donovan also criticises the short-termism of some business leaders, which has led to common demands for proof of ROI (return on investment) in unreasonable time frames. They ignore the mid term and strategic value of systems that enable further opportunities for growth, he says. While he professes to understand reluctance to commit in down markets and the cynicism borne of earlier long term ERP implementations that have fallen below expectations, he insists that business leaders need to understand the criticality of modern network systems. “They are enabling technologies certainly for cost reduction, but also for efficiencies and for changing the game where supply chain operations and manufacturing strategies are concerned,” he says. And he cites examples of IP telephony (voice over IP) which can result in huge cost savings at all levels, as well as “providing the springboard to additional applications and productivity.” Neil Crockett, Cisco’s manufacturing marketing director, also alludes to the power of factory floor Ethernet as part of the ‘shop floor to top floor’ solution – and another area that has as yet received under-investment. “There seems to be a huge disconnect between IT in networking terms and business people,” he says. “Modern networking is about getting processes and information anywhere any time; putting agility back at the top of the agenda and unlocking the information that’s already there.” Both point to the example of their own company – which now famously outsources all of its manufacturing, managing and controlling its supply and demand chains via its Oracle ERP system and its networking solutions.