Integrated plant systems

In the ever-changing global environment, manufacturers are facing challenges with regards to competition, globalisation, increasing input costs, quality, unsynchronised supply chains and shareholders` demands for greater returns. Manufactures are forced to implement common infrastructures and processes with an emphasis on cost management and improved capital efficiency, while focusing on delivered customer value.

Manufacturers are increasingly put under pressure to synchronise manufacturing with the supply chain, thus increasing the pressure on manufacturing and distribution systems to be more effective, more responsive and less costly. This increases the importance and value of manufacturing information, both internally and externally.

Roy Slavin, former president and CEO of Wonderware Corporation, relates a true story in the Wonderware Vision Satellite Broadcast of August 1999, that dramatically illustrates the point.

He was put in charge of a switch manufacturing company in Illinois at a time when the company had been losing money for a decade and losing market share to its Japanese competitors. In spite of drastically cut overheads, the writing was on the wall and the company only had enough cash left to last another 90 days. The office building, adjacent to the plant, was home to about 150 accountants, managers and engineers. The plant had a head count of about 350 operators, foremen and production managers. Tradition held that people in the office didn`t talk to people in the plant and vice-versa. The situation was further complicated by union issues. With less than 90 days to go and with this position likely to be the shortest of his career, Slavin hired contractors over a weekend to tear down the walls and partitions between the offices and the plant. Desks were moved into the plant and large white boards were installed at strategic locations to show order, production and other statistics for everyone to see. While a number of people didn`t like the new arrangement, it yielded 100% increase in revenue over the remainder of the 90 days and 300% over the year. And technology didn`t do this as it happened in 1972, when the only - and most sophisticated - application running in the company was a single production and inventory control system in the business office. The plant itself had nothing.

We`ve come a long way since 1972 - the advent of new, enabling technologies and solutions, open architectures and standards and the increasing number of compatible third-party solutions has provided manufacturers with the range of solutions they need in a complex and competitive world.

It is no longer about SCADA or MES or SCM or ERP or Web-enablement. It`s about all of these, because they are the building blocks of a single entity called a manufacturing enterprise. Today, SCADA systems - and even PLCs - are being integrated into the IT domain by means of networking technologies that fuel the information pipeline that informs all interested parties about what`s happening at the "coal face" of the company. Even a few years ago, SCADA was something that happened over there and, thankfully, out of sight. What a way to treat the wealth-creating processes of a manufacturing company!

SCADA systems are integrated with MES (production planning, batch control, logistics, etc) and real-time preventative maintenance systems that minimise downtime while optimising ROI. MES and maintenance solutions, in turn, are being integrated with ERP systems that monitor the company`s financial business, costing, customer order management (COM), procurement processes, general ledger and other processes and functions. Common, rather than proprietary, databases are allowing the development of customised applications and the sharing of data between applications, while the Internet is enabling e-everything and allows plant managers to view, diagnose and even control their plants from anywhere in the world.

Integrated production systems (IPS) gather real-time information from the production site and provide visibility over current production activities, so that changes can be made, as needed, to respond to demand and production-floor changes while incorporating production flexibility. Over the last 24 months, the need for visibility into manufacturing - across the enterprise as a whole - has expanded greatly. IPS is being pulled up into the organisation so that it creates value across the enterprise, not just at a single plant location. One of the key challenges is to design/build a responsive manufacturing model, based on an enterprise-wide IPS infrastructure. An IPS system is evolving from a more tactical solution and is becoming a strategic solution and a competitive weapon.

IPS focuses on rapid deployment, solid ROI, enterprise visibility and plant floor efficiency. In order to maximise investment connection to the manufacturing operation, real-time information is critical because real-time information means money. The availability of real-time information has enabled business management to remove large amounts of inventory, safety stock and worker redundancies and has armed firms with detailed data to fine-tune product specification to meet the needs of individual customers. Manufacturers are moving beyond "deliver to promise" and are moving towards "deliver to opportunity".

The critical components required to face the challenges presented to manufacturing in the new millennium in terms of customer service and production efficiencies are:

* Synchronise business processes with manufacturing processes;

* Optimise the supply chain;

* Automate business and production processes (internal and external);

* Generate value by empowering people and measuring results;

* Look to customers as top priority; and

* Enable collaboration using Internet solutions.

E-production indicates the impact of e-business or collaborative commerce on plant floors and the expanding role of manufacturing execution systems as an aggregator and disseminator of production data. The MES is an important link in supply chain management and centres around the idea of using Internet technology and web-based plant management software to communicate real-time plant-floor information to enterprises and supply chains. IPS is enhancing organisations` initiatives in supply chain and in e-commerce, by providing an integrated set of production systems, completing the cycle from planning through execution and performance evaluation. E-production provides for a production enterprise architecture using core capabilities of true factory/plant systems, complemented by ERP capabilities.

AMR research says: "The core of [an] e-manufacturing strategy is the technology roadmap for information transparency between the customer, manufacturing operations and suppliers."

Business systems and plant systems must be tightly coupled to reduce decision times and increase plant productivity. This coupling is an integration effort that is often overlooked in implementing the ERP system. It is common for enterprises to expect the business process between plant and ERP system to be straightforward. This is rarely the case, because plant systems serve dramatically different needs and address very different issues from ERP systems. (ERP systems are by nature transactional systems, whereas plant systems focus on real-time operational information). Effective integration means that plant systems must be developed and deployed to address the full spectrum of business processes and equip ERP systems to drive the enterprise.

ERP vendors promise `real-time financials` that can make the entire organisation more responsive. Though an accountant`s view of `real-time` is different to that of a plant engineer, delivering on this promise requires access to current data from throughout the enterprise, including manufacturing.

The most frequently cited benefit is improved decision support within the plant. Most of the information used in plant decision-making, aside from the production schedule, comes from the plant itself, not from ERP. Most plant-level systems deal with more detailed data - temperatures, pressures, flow rates - instead of higher level business information such as pricing, shipment schedules, production orders, which is valuable in decision support. Integrating plant data into ERP first requires meaningful transformation of that data - production orders into set points, flow rates into production totals, etc.

In an organisation with centralised control over its plants, the integration with plant systems gives corporate decision makers a more realistic view of what is actually happening in the plant and plant decision-makers gain better visibility of business drivers that impact on their decisions. Changes to schedules are made with knowledge of the business impact, and contingency plans can be used when delays in raw material receipts are anticipated.

Another important benefit often mentioned is improved cost and financial accuracy. In practice, improved accuracy might be the result of improved consistency. Improved accuracy may result from decreased duplication in keying data, a benefit which is maybe less significant in the magnitude of the total benefits.

As one solution definitely does not fit all, there is also a new breed of knowledge workers and system integrators at work. They can integrate these technologies and applications to meet the exact requirements of their clients across a multitude of manufacturing environments, and accommodate any changes to those requirements in the future.

Today, professional system integrators need to know almost more about their clients` business than the clients themselves. But they cannot only consult - they must also implement. The requirements of a continuous process manufacturer, for example (eg chemical, pharmaceutical, food, paper and pulp, etc) are vastly different to those of a discrete manufacturer (eg mechanical sub-assemblies, automotive, aeronautical, etc). Not only are the manufacturing processes different, but so are the logistics, supplier/customer relationships - the list goes on and on. Somebody has to look at the end-user`s needs, check for applicable solutions and customise the closest fit to conform to requirements, while also taking into account how disparate applications from a variety of vendors will communicate with one another. And it all needs to be future-proof and instantly changeable to cope with new technological opportunities or business environments - such as e-commerce or e-business.

Everything depends on everything else and the emerging co-operative technologies and applications from various solution suppliers, rather than the monolithic solutions of the past, are helping to glue it all together while handling all the incredible complexities of competitive production in the 21st century. It is all happening more rapidly than people think, and if these factors are not considered in determining a business and information strategy, an organisation may find itself left out in the cold in the ever-changing global business environment.