You've heard 'em before: Shop floor to top floor. Sensors to boardroom. The concept is an old favorite: linking factory floor systems to enterprise information systems so executives can leverage production data to make better decisions. Today, there are several ways to achieve this but the promise of seamless integration was never quite fulfilled, was it?
Now there's P2B, or production to business, a shorthand term for collaborative production management (CPM), a concept coined by the ARC Advisory Group a year or two ago that may be finally gaining traction. CPM encompasses other concepts such as operational performance management (OPM). In a nutshell, the term captures the convergence of business processes and systems that were traditionally covered by manufacturing execution systems (MES).
"CPM is focused on delivering metrics that help managers assess how the factory floor machinery and personnel are performing on business strategy and goals," says Dick Slansky, senior analyst for ARC. As companies become ever more global, assembling components and sourcing materials offshore, finding ways to optimize business processes and tighten up the production cycle becomes critical. CPM is one way to do that, notes Slansky.
"Today we're seeing connection among all the domains in the manufacturing enterprise -- product design, production, supplier relations, customer relations. This goes far beyond what traditional MES envisioned," Slansky points out. ARC analysts created the term CPM to codify the broadening of scope.
It has taken some time for vendors to come out with solutions addressing CPM, and it will likely take even longer before manufacturers adopt CPM en masse, if they in fact do. SAP and Oracle are taking the "top-down" approach to CPM by extracting data from the factory floor systems and correlating it with accounting information to assess the performance and condition of factory equipment.
By contrast, the big-name automation vendors (Rockwell Automation, GE Fanuc and Invensys, to name a few) are pursuing a "bottom-up" approach by integrating what happens on the factory floor (through data collected by PLCs and other network nodes) with data captured from production and business systems. With the exception of Invensys, these vendors fall down because absent a major integration exercise they do not have the visibility necessary to pull data into a dashboard with real utility to executives, says Slansky.
"These companies have been very good at dealing with a horizontal architecture. But they don't do as good a job with vertical integration. They're always trying to find new ways to do this. They're not there yet," says Slansky.
Invensys is working on open process control (OPC) methods of data transport. In order for the CPM vision to be achieved, "we need to break down the separation between IT and automation," says Dr. Peter Martin, vice president and general manager of performance management for Invensys. It is now possible to integrate across the islands of information, but organizational islands still exist, he adds.
Smaller companies such as Activplant Corp. (London, Ontario, Canada), Lighthammer (Exton, PA) and Visiprise (Atlanta) are having success extracting raw factory floor data, aggregating it in a meaningful way via open standards such as OPC and presenting it in a dashboard or scorecard for business use. Using technology from Activplant, for example, a car manufacturer would be able to send production line data via OPC up to an enterprise dashboard. The executive "might want to get data on particular vehicle going down the line so they can track and trace it. Where there are multiple models being assembled on the same production line, they need to see data quickly to get an idea of where things stand," says Slansky. This is increasingly important as manufacturers become more and more globalized and need to stay on top of their far-flung operations.
Though CPM is on the rise, MES is not yet dead. Says Slansky, "It's still functioning. But its sphere of activities has really changed and evolved. CPM reflects the new reality."