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.
