Production management needs to provide visibility and control across multiple sites

Apriso vice president of marketing and product development Tom Comstock says that investing in systems to improve plant and factory management needs to move up a level, and hence the system. “Global manufacturing is more than series of plant by plant installations. Users need software to manage across them. They need to be able to manage processes and best practices but they also need real-time visibility across facilities displaying uniform KPIs.” Beyond that, operations directors charged with responsibility for far flung contract manufacturers know they need to be able to manage traceability and WIP (work in progress) information. And they also need to be able to manage their production systems across the network from an operational point of view – people, resources, local language and regulatory issues and so on. Hence Apriso’s new system, dubbed FlexNet Global Manufacturing suite, which “pushes the definition of MES,” according to Comstock. “I go way back to when MES was defined as managing the five elements – material, equipment, product lifecycle data, people and tooling. Now you add the sixth – multiple sites, contractors and so forth. “For so long companies have under-invested in production – that’s why manufacturers have substantial problems. As ERP investment slows down, companies are realising their mistakes and looking to manufacturing to fulfil their initial ERP visions. They’re starting to understand that they need their solutions to work down all the way down to manufacturing – and then across all their sites.” And analyst Aberdeen Group agrees. “Manufacturers with distributed enterprises need two things to operate efficiently and remain competitive: a single platform flexible enough to coordinate activity across multiple plants and geographies; and the technology infrastructure to manage multiple, disparate deployments with agility” says Jane Biddle, vice president of manufacturing research at Aberdeen. “The Apriso platform is flexible for local implementation, yet global in its ability to provide visibility into, and drive decisions down to, the individual plant floor, whether the plant is in Chicago or Shanghai.”