The seven requirements of e-manufacturing
-- Modern Materials Handling, 5/15/2001
We are finally seeing tools that take manufacturing processes to the Web, as our recent story on e-manufacturing points out. Here's what you must do to take advantage of the new Web capabilities for manufacturing.
The Internet presents both threats and opportunities for manufacturers in today’s economy, says Gregory C. Gorbach, director of e-manufacturing for ARC Advisory Group, Dedham, Mass.
"The threat," he says, "is that your competitor will find new ways to compete using collaborative manufacturing models and you won’t. They’ll do it first and take your business."
The opportunity? "You’ll do it first and take their business," says Gorbach.
For manufacturers who want to take advantage of the opportunities, Gorbach has identified seven requirements for e-manufacturing success.
1. Synchronize production and business processes. In order to keep pace with the accelerating speed of business, Gorbach says that e-manufacturers must raise the visibility of manufacturing information to optimize performance, enhance responsiveness, and manage costs. The winners, he adds, will be those who leverage manufacturing data to continuously improve their own operations, and to enhance those of their suppliers and customers.
2. Orchestrate upstream flows of work, information, and materials. Plants need to utilize supply chain planning systems and procurement systems to improve their overall supply chain performance. The goal, Gorbach says, is to leverage this information in real time to work against actual demand rather than forecasts of anticipated demand. Marketplaces and trading exchanges, he believes, are the frontier for collaboration and the real-time exchange of information across trading networks.
3. Automate business processes and workflows within the enterprise and across the value chain. Too often, Gorbach says, supply chain management has involved passive reporting on a set of predefined values with no ability to dynamically reconfigure business operations. Instead, manufacturing managers need new tools that allow them to have visibility into events as they occur, and the ability to impact those events to add value.
4. Give control to managers with plant information and analysis tools. The idea is to create a dashboard view of operations, in real time. New Internet-based tools allow e-manufacturing managers to visualize information from a variety of systems throughout the enterprise, and interpret the results in conjunction with established performance metrics.
5. Integrate the design process among all collaborating parties. The manufacturing process begins well before the line ever starts to run. New internet-based tools are emerging to support collaborative design and engineering processes.
6. Leverage bi-directional information with customers. The essence of collaboration, Gorbach says, is the ability for individual plants to schedule their work in real time based on accepted orders, and to coordinate the delivery of component materials needed at the production level to meet those schedules. That involves sharing not only with suppliers, but providing visibility into the manufacturing process to customers, while gaining visibility into real-time demand from customers.
7. Enable collaborative maintenance and manufacturing support. Just as e-manufacturers need to collaborate with their suppliers and customers, they also need to collaborate with plant equipment suppliers to keep the plant running.
Building the real-time supply chain
08/31/2006Supply chain software suite
04/22/2008Supply chain execs share expertise
03/28/2006Software: A new supply chain by design
11/30/2008e-manufacturing gets started
05/14/2001
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