In a few years’ time, manufacturing executives might have to start commemorating Sept. 17 as annual “IT union day.” That was the day in 2007 when industry group MESA declared once and for all that factory floor data would finally become a vital asset for corporate decision makers.
MESA’s new pièce de résistance in its longtime push to feed shop floor information into enterprise systems would be a collection of five guidebooks that walk executives through an aspirational set of five key objectives that business leaders would reach by infusing shop floor data into ERP and other corporate systems. No manufacturing CEO could deny the strategic importance of these objectives, which call for optimizing asset performance management, lean manufacturing, quality and regulatory compliance, product lifecycle management, and the real-time enterprise.
“If you look at the five strategic initiatives, they come from the very top of the enterprise,” says Jan Snoeij, chairman of MESA’s European arm and principal consultant at Logica’s MES Centre of Excellence in Armhem, Holland. “Software and systems from the factory floor will help you complete your objectives.”
The guidebooks, conceived by MESA in early 2007 and officially announced a year ago, are expected to begin rolling out this month — at least in draft form.
“We’ll have a completed draft for each of these by the MESA conference in September,” says John Dyck, global director, software business development, at Rockwell Automation, who heads the working committee for the asset performance management group.
As will become apparent to those attending that conference in Orlando, FL, later this month, the guidebooks are taking shape, but are works in progress. According to Dyck, each of the five books will be roughly 50 pages long, including an executive summary. MESA will publish them primarily online, where they will change as more information comes in about best practices. “These are living documents,” says MESA Chairman and Rockwell Information Software Marketing Director Matt Bauer. “This is the first pass across the fence as it becomes more of a collaborative effort across MESA’s membership.”
MESA will also lace the guidebooks with graphs, charts, diagrams, architectural drawings, and user case studies. Dyck describes them as “pragmatic” and as styled after USA Today, the American newspaper known for snappy articles and colorful graphics.
The guidebooks are expected to be available to attendees at MESA’s European conference in Prague in November, but it is not yet clear when the documents will be fully completed and formally approved.
As this process unfolds, the latest march will begin in MESA’s long journey to generate enthusiasm among manufacturing executives for manufacturing execution systems (MES), product lifecycle management (PLM), and other shop floor software. To get corporate executives to no longer regard software such as MES — if they were thinking of it at all — as some arcane bit of technology, MESA believes it is time to catapult MES into the pantheon of technologies that executives must deploy, such as ERP.
After all, that’s why MESA, whose roots are in the MES software that tracks and monitors factory machines, changed its name several years ago from the Manufacturing Execution Systems Association to the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association. Nevertheless, MES continues to play a strong role in MESA’s mission. As MESA Europe members made clear in a Prague roundtable last spring, for instance, MES is the key to extracting value out of the €14 billion that Gartner says companies will spend on ERP this year.
“ERP vendors have been guilty of what I call ‘marginalisation marketing’ — in other words, marginalising the MES level because they say their ERP can do everything a customer needs,” says Karl Schneebauer, MESA Europe vice chairman. Schneebauer, who is also partner manager at German MES vendor MPDV, says that SAP’s recent acquisition of MES vendor Visiprise demonstrates the importance of MES to ERP.
“In the past, MES was a function of production activities,” says MESA Europe’s Snoeij. “Now, it includes the supply chain and the complete manufacturing enterprise.”
Again, enter the guidebooks and the strategic corporate initiatives. The supply chain, for instance, can benefit from MESA’s “real-time enterprise” initiative, Snoeij says. By knowing exactly when a certain machine is down or when another has finished its task, and by feeding that MES information into enterprise systems, top executives can then make well-informed decisions on things like buying, selling, and forecasting.
“If I’m a manufacturer and I’ve made a schedule, I expect certain parts in this afternoon at five o’clock. I can find out from MES if they are not coming, and make changes accordingly,” Snoeij says.
Or as Cambridge, England-based analyst Simon Bragg of ARC says, “Manufacturers have begun to realize that if they want supply chain benefits, they need the visibility of what each plant is doing.”
In an example from the lean initiative, MES will relay key findings between lean projects across a company to help lean scale, says Ganesh Wadawadigi, senior director of operational excellence suite solution management for SAP Labs, who heads MESA’s lean group.
Pierfancesco Manenti, a Milan-based analyst with IDC Manufacturing Insights, offers an even more fundamental area of focus that should help drive sales of MES software. “Manufacturers in the last 10 years have forgotten the importance of manufacturing,” he says. In Manenti’s opinion, the emphasis over the last decade-plus on offshoring, logistics, the supply chain, and low-cost production has taken manufacturers’ attention away from automation and other nitty-gritty shop floor matters.
MES software will now help to rectify that, says Manenti, the author of a forthcoming MES report tentatively called “MES Global Competitive Landscape” and due for release next month. In a virtuous circle, the global supply chain that manufacturers have built up can benefit from the visibility that MES would provide. Without it,
Manenti says, “the factory can become the bottleneck of this incredible supply chain if the supply chain is not connected to real-time information about what happens in the factory.”
Manenti also predicts that Chinese factories will start to automate more as labor costs rise, creating additional opportunities to deploy MES. What’s more, he says, some manufacturers will start to move production back to Europe, where they are more likely to then deploy software such as MES that they will integrate into enterprise systems.
Scaling Up MES
Further helping MES in its drive onto the executive radar screen is the maturation into a product that scales across a company’s various plants, says ARC’s Bragg. MES vendors in the past deployed one software program per plant and had to redesign for a manufacturer’s separate facilities. Generally, one MES package can now serve several plants. MES vendors such as Wonderware, SAP, Siemens, GE, Rockwell, and others are all striving in that direction.
“You’ll see more examples of this sort of thing,” Snoeij says. “The large MES vendors are at last working out a solution where the kernel is standardized.”
Logica, for example, has been applying the same piece of MES software — Camstar’s Inside — to 10 different Asian manufacturing sites for NXP (the former Philips Semiconductor). Likewise, Dutch solutions provider and MES specialist ATS International is getting ready to deploy an off-the-shelf MES program across 15 Carlsberg breweries.
That scaling up of MES has plenty of “corporate initiative” ramifications, as it means that consulting and solutions companies such as Logica and ATS are now focusing less on plant-by-plant software development and more on tying the deployments into corporate initiatives — à la MESA’s five corporate objectives.
“Today, we do more with helping with the change management, with the change in the way of working that the MES can bring. We help manufacturers select the right software and then help them to implement it into the proper way into the enterprise,” Snoeij says.
Sounds like yet another good reason for some guidebooks. But not everyone is convinced that MESA should be in the guidebook business, at least not as a way to establish standard procedures. A vocal sector of the manufacturing IT industry believes that an International Standards Association (ISA) standard called ISA-95 already addresses the practical intentions of MESA’s guidebooks.
“That’s what ISA-95 is all about,” says Alison Smith, research director at Boston-based AMR Research. “ISA-95 is a functional model that describes the flow and exchange of information between various information systems in manufacturing. MESA should be focusing on S95. We don’t need more models. We need to pick one and get on with life. Let’s make progress rather than replicating what we’re already doing.”
Nevertheless, Smith says, the guidebooks could, if nothing else, serve as “a great way for vendors to get visibility.”
Bauer, Snoeij, and others wouldn’t argue with Smith’s visibility point. But they do take issue with her over ISA-95, which they say MESA recognizes and includes in its corporate initiatives. The guidebooks, they say, are a way of deploying ISA-95 while masking its technical language and appealing to executives in business language.
But the guidebooks haven’t been easy to put together. “We took a long time to start down the execution path,” Dyck says. “This is a huge effort. Finding the right definition of terms was a huge challenge up front.”
On top of that, Dyck says, MESA initially faced the predictable “butts in seats” problem of finding committed people from its member companies who would devote the time necessary to create the guidebooks. MESA is a voluntary organization whose guidebook project takes people away from their paying jobs, so “that caused some churn,” Dyck says.
None of that is deterring the organization, however. MESA is planning to declare more strategic corporate initiatives and write more guidebooks after it launches the first five in Prague. Realistically, no one’s expecting instant results. After all, MESA has been trying to strengthen the role of shop floor data since the early 1990s. The guidebooks, with their clear links to corporate strategic initiatives, should help advance the cause.
Note to manufacturing executives: 2010 might be a good year to celebrate your first Sept 17 IT Union Day.