Next level of lean is web technologies enabled

Lean is key – because of its business and manufacturing thinking and framework – but with Internet, wireless and auto-ID technologies, and the prospect of inter-business process synchronization, it’s going supply chain wide. That’s an increasingly common view, and one to which software giant Oracle subscribes. But at its Oracle OpenWorld event at the ExCeL Centre in London’s Docklands last month, Simon Pollard, vice president of manufacturing for EMEA, expressed concerned that users need first to see beyond the technologies, to what next generation lean business will look like. He agrees there are big middleware, bandwidth and database implications involving change, security, scaleability and resilience – but suggests that business leaders’ attention needs first to be on how manufacturing runs in the new world. “We’re talking with Toyota, for example, about the lean evolution: if they can make a real-time commitment to build and supply internally and across supply chains [automatically] they can take lean to the next level.” His point: technologies that automate information and material movements, while removing the ‘black holes’ common in supply chains, confer serious competitive advantages and thus ROI, with all the benefits of further reduced inventories, lead times and so on. Similarly, outside automotive, for example in food and beverage supply chains, the model is about delivering better shelf availability, less shrinkage etc. “The technologies will allow a different kind of thinking,” says Pollard. Hence the need for re-thinking, particularly if Pollard is right, and the real-time, connected, big lean world is only three to five years away, not 10—15 years as some pundits suggest. Beyond business and culture change, appropriate KPIs and the rest though, for IT managers it will be about connected, resilient IT infrastructures at the micro plant level, the enterprise level and spanning supply chains. Best advice: think, and then at the IT level, think sensor-based computing, including RFID, but also infrastructure and middleware – with appropriate application servers, Web services and the service orientated architecture (SOA) and portal frameworks for enterprise systems and business process flows.