Sometimes. Many and most manufacturers require some kind of Capital Expenditure (CapEx) justification where somekind of ROI has to be constructed for any IT project over a given amount, say $100K. Some process are better than others but only 15% actually measure results according to MESA International. However, most company as usaul these day are missing the big fish. A detailed ROI validated the system’s requirements, migration path and business expectations if it is based on what level of improvement over what time period is expected on a granualar level from the actual quantified waste streams from a value stream analysis of the product workflow. Otherwise, the requirements have no real connection to business expectations.

A study by AMR in Q4 2007 compared the percentage of manufacturing revunue for each continent for 2007 and 2012. As expected, it showed that the North American dropping form 83% to 62%, and Asia increasing from 11% to 28%. Not expected, Western Europe increases from 21% to 23%, and Eastern Europe increases from 10% to 17%. Why? I have spent a lot of time working, teaching and presenting in Europe over the last 10 years and, especially, over the last 3 years. At the corporate CIO and COO level, European companies are appling standards-based manufacturing operations systems at the plant and supply chain levels to enable adaptive manufacturing and Lean supply chains. And it is and will pay off for Europe by keeping their companies competitive so they are able to keep the manufacturing jobs. They have been highly innovative and taken a reduction in profit for long-term sustainability. For example, 45% of the membership of the OPC Foundation now is in Europe and only 35% in USA. Please help me find leadership in North America.

Lask week on May 20-21 in Cleveland, I spoke at the first annual Manufacturing IT Forum hosted by ISA. Overall, the content and form was excellent, but the attendance was small. The forum was a series of panels hosted by representitives of the five top magazine in the manufacturing operations software space. Every panel was very good. I represented Control magazine as the host of the panel on The Collision of IT and Manufacturing. This panel highlighted Eric Cosman of Dow, who spoke on the various ways that IT and engineering organizations are able to work together as separate, combined and hybrid groups. Another highlight was the IBM talk by Dave Noller on SOA for Manufacturing where he explained that SOA in manufacturing required the use of an information model based on standards to be successful. I also attended the break-out session on how to reach the CIO that was hosted by Mike Brooks of Chevron. It had a good discussion that highlighted that the CIO is a long way from getting interoperability or SOA benefits, so efforts need to be focused on the path and making the business case to the CIO’s Directors. In the concluding session, The Futrue of IT in Manufacturing, Mike Brooks boldly and correctly stated that software vendor must understand that not supporting the rapid transformation of their product meta data models towards compliance with the Open O&M standards to help their customers successfully implement SOA, they will lose customers.

The biggest issue is that ISA and all of the publications in the manufacturing software space were not able to get the end users or the SIs to attend this very important discussion.

Hello All, Be nice to your mother and wife today.

I am going to discuss how end users are setting themself up for failure or delayed success in implementing manufacturing operations management systems. It starts by not recognizing and realizing that a plant’s capacity should not be based on head count or limited by the labor resource. The mistake that most (not all) manufacturers are making right now is attempting to optimize their plants either through continuous improvement methods or manufacturing operations management systems or a combination of both WITHOUT THE REQUIRED ADDITIONAL HEADS or skill sets or training to actually succeed or have any chance of success.

HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY. For instance, if plant engineering or corporate IT are funded and moving forward with requirements for a product tracking and tracing systems and are not getting dedicated knowledgable people from the product design, quality and production teams, the project will fail. Many times in the last few years, I have run across projects where directors and supervisors tell the executive IT or engineering sponsor that they will support the project then do not due to their head counts. Bottom line: Adaptive manufacturing systems can not increase efficiency or lower rework or increase yield unless real human resources are applied. After the system has built up a real knowledge base and actually made the plant adaptive, yes, the labor can be reduced. But not until then.

“The art of life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s.” The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned from 161 AD to 180 AD) was perhaps the only true philosopher-king in the history of the world. He formulated his pantheist Stoic beliefs with a passionate religious conviction. He shared the basic Stoic belief in the divinity of the cosmos as an intelligent being with a soul and stressed (perhaps too fatalistically) the harmony of all things (or lack thereof)and the importance of resigning oneself to whatever happened.

I’ve always thought that he meant that you’ve got to meet the unexpected head-on, grapple with it (like a wrestler), rather than try to tiptoe around it (for the sake of political advantage or status quo).

This is how I view where we are today with ISA-88 and 95. In 2008, we are tiptoeing around the obvious changes and challenges to preserve the 1990 status quo and politics of the first generation of automation after paper and relay electronics. In the 1990s, when the standards were started and conceived, the developers were putting forth the first draft efforts to organize batch manufacturing systems and the business-to-manufacturing interfaces in the process industries and make-to-stock big batch. The committees correctly saw that much of their work was applicable (and still is) to discrete and hybrid batch industries, but failed to recognize, directly seek out and include more than a token representative in the drafting process from the discrete and hybrid batch industries.

I am sure I will get some debate on this, but the fact is the primary contributors, authors and reviewers of 95% of the material are from the big batch and process industries. So now that ALL TYPES of manufacturing are having to go global and figure out their version of the pull supply chain, even process and big batch industries are having to create discrete workflows for single-order fullfilment. What that means is that the discrete and hybrid industries are EITHER requiring their vendors to build a custom application implementation or data model based on the 95 B2M data model and/or 88 batch application data model OR building the custom 95/88 implementation model themselves. Why? Because these manufacturers want what the process and big batch already have in their 90’s DCSs. — a single-plant model to take across their plants to make the interfaces, reports and analytics consistant, repeatable, accurate and last but not least, configurable as opposed to custom. Note though, that to accomplish this, process and big batch manufacturers’ sold their plants’ souls to a DCS vendor and standardized on a vendor implementation model and not an open-standard model.

So where are we? ISA95 is still an interface or data exchange model that is predominately controlled by big batch and process vendors and consultants with a few end-user heros. The discrete and hybrid batch industries like the 95 models, but want Part 4 to be an implementation model. This will not happen unless those companies actually participate and draft it. Otherwise the configurable world for these industries is 15 years off, and a new standards committee has to be formed to do this work utilizing a new group of authors/engineers from those industries. So get used to the hight cost of custom, inflexible systems. Adaptive manufacturing is still a buzz word for your industries for a long time.

So while I was participating in the ISA-95 in Austin virtually from Idaho, IBM presented a short overview (attached) of itsr new product, Reference Semantic Model. RSM provides the first comprehensive set of MOM standards templates for IBM’s (and others) new manufacturing services bus products. IBM has brought together methods to map and configure multiple MOM standards so any manufacuring company is now able to build a single corporate set of templates to establish the standard work basis for production transformation relatively quickly.

This is Lean IT! IBM has filled the holes between the standards with its best-guess configuration which was based on a survey of many industry experts. The first impression is that the templates and configuration are heavily influenced by and towards process industries. The batch, hybrid and discrete configuration of the MOM standards are still needed. IBM seems to view this product as simply addressing building of B2M and B2B interface schema, but not the information or application models that the non-process industries are demanding. But this is a revolutionary step forward and MUST be recognized as such. IBM is giving all its configuration to the standards committee of ISA88/95, MIMOSA, OPC, OAG and others to incorporate into their standards through the peer-review process. ALL END USERS should be involved. There is no patent, just copyright being claimed by IBM.

I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU ATTEND THE DEEP DIVE OF THIS PRODUCT TOMORROW MORNING AT 8:30 CENTRAL TIME. ISA 95 meeting to the Deep Dive on Thursday April 17, 2008 at the ISA 95 Meeting. Live Meeting and dial-in are below.

8:30am central -12:00 RSM Model Review Model H. Falk/IBM
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Hello All,
Again, I am getting lost in the high demand for systems and methods for implementing MOM systems and methods by companies to transform their production capability from Make-to-Stock paper-based manufacturing to the 21st Century “TO BE” adaptive manufacturing form. I need to provide this blog more time. With that said, I will be better. But I need you as a reader to be better as well. Please tell this group about your production transformation issue and journey.

So this week I have been participating in the ISA-95 Committee Meeting. As usual, the debate and contributions have been very good by the core group. End-user participation is still GREATLY NEEDED for THE STANDARD for adaptive manufacturing at this point in history of manufacturing and social transition. f all the comments submitted (Very good and informed comments) at this meeting , NONE of them are from end users. This real crisis is a true crisis and need to be raised to your executive management as such. THE QUALITY AND USABILTY OF THIS STANDARD WILL DETERMINE THE SUCCESS OF YOUR COMPANY. DISAGREEE? WHY?

As manufacturing companies transform their linear, primarily continental supply chain of the 20th century to a “necessary to complete” globally distributed supply networks and exchanges, they are realizing that their IT infrastructure must change. Most companies have isolated systems for each department with hard-coded interfaces between the applications to support each other and the general business processes of each department. There is a major trend underway with in the supply chain and IT departments to change the approach to system infrastructure to one that first starts with the design of the business process in a business process managment (BPM) system. Systems and interfaces are then designed to support end- to-end business processes, not department-focused systems. “We reduced processing time from 6 weeks to 48 hours and the associated labor by 70%.” “We increased transaction capacity by 50% and reduced staff and processing time by 30% each.”

Towards this end, GE Fanuc has been developing an industrial BPM engine operation for process management for the last 3 years to bring this same transformation to the typical approach to developing production opeations systems. The product, Workflow Module, is being released Q3 of this year. It orchestrates the enterprise BPM events and tasks with those of the plant workflow processes in recipes, routes, work instructions, alarm situations and event situations. This product is based on a service-oriented architecture utilizing MS.NET’s Workflow engine, but then applies ISA-95’s process and product segment structures with resource definiiton libraries. The 95 structure is native, which makes the resulting application data model native. This allows the data collection, analytics, reports and interfaces to be configurable. This change in methodology for developiing manufacturing opeations and process systems will be revolutionary, but strongly resisted by the process industry vendors of DCS systems who have been programming production workflows in their proprietary data models for 15 years. But now as companies have to move to make-to-order distributed supply networks to survive as global companies the discrete and batch industries are in immediate need for the industrial BPM approach for adaptive manufacturing.

Many vendors and integrators ask me who should be targeted in a manufacturering company and how to sell MOM or MES solutions. You can target heads of manufacturing (production director, operations director, etc), middle ‘manufacturing’ management (production/manufacturing/engineering managers), financial directors or the executive level. At this point in the history and adoption of integrated MOM systems, most seem to get the best results doing the bottom-up sell for the single plant unless it is a multiplant, corporate IT initiative. I think the best/most responses are from the manufacturing functions as opposed to the financial ones at this time. I guess this reflects that manufacturing folk feel the most pains that MES fixes, although some financial managers also have an eye on the manufacturing KPIs, but these are the leaders and innovators.

My belief is that at this time in history the financial people require solutions for lowering mfg cost, but you must be able to provide justifiable evidence and a demostrated methodology based business case.

The plant management has the real need for MOM solutions, but have no resources and no budget and generally do not know how to do an IT CAPEX justification or know how the ROI methods prove it.

The supply chain people desperately need real-time visibility into capability and capacity, but typically trivialize the plant solutions and their integration since they do not know that the available capability mix of resources is continually changing across a shift and day.

The product engineering people want to reduce cost, but more important is predictable cost.
So bottom line…know who the customer is, the language of your coach and your internal and external competition.

Hello All and Good Day,
So last week the usual industry protagonists and innovators attended; BUT the number was less than 150. WHY, WHY WHY are 500 people not at this conference? This conference, year to year, has better content than any analyst, vendor or standards conference. Please tell me. I am at a loss other than the fact that WBF (or ISA) has never been good at marketing to IT or mfg IT groups; but all on the 88 and 95 list servers know about it, and MESA advertises it. People this is THE USERS GROUP. USE IT.