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.
