Sarah Mather has a background as a financial analyst with an undergraduate degree in economics and a master's degree in public health. But as the vice president of business systems and administration at Fusion UV Systems Inc., a maker of industrial ultraviolet lamp systems, she's in charge of the IT group and the human resources department. An odd mix of responsibilities, indeed.
She was drawn into HR because of that department's need for data analysis. Since no one in HR knew anything about technology, Mather was picked to implement a human resources information system (HRIS). Soon thereafter, the company decided to move from older ERP systems that ran on separate databases for European and U.S. operations to a single instance of SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany), which would be located in the company's Gaithersburg, MD, headquarters. At the time, Mather was in HR, but she took charge of that IT deployment, too.
"The reason I was in charge of the ERP implementation was because our corporate management acknowledged that a successful implementation is a people issue," Mather says. "It's getting people to work together effectively and getting them to listen to each other."
When the SAP system went live in January 2004, slowly but surely she began to get all departments -- including people in manufacturing -- involved in the upkeep of the system. "A purchasing manager, a supervisor of materials or even a production planning person all have IT-like responsibilities," she says. "They are responsible for the functional definitions of what the software will do. And if they have a problem, they are the ones that have to fix it or define it well enough so someone with more technology expertise can help."
As Mather experienced, many manufacturing professionals today are faced with the issue of building a unified corporate culture that blends internal teams. Companies may be growing globally, but they are also compressing the workforce internally. Specifically, companies are merging enterprise IT and manufacturing automation teams that have traditionally sat on different sides of the house -- never crossing paths, never intermingling, never sharing information about technology deployments. Now, however, with technology as a driver, those paths are starting to cross.
Technology vendors such as SAP and Lighthammer Software Development Corp. (acquired by SAP in June) have become a catalyst for this interaction, providing the tools and the applications that help bridge the gap between the shop floor and the top floor. But as part of that integration effort, there is a real need to reorganize internal groups to support the business process transition. As a result, titles such as "manager of IT/factory systems" or "vice president of manufacturing IT" or "production IT supervisor" are popping up on business cards.
Consolidating IT and manufacturing groups is not as simple as it looks embossed on a business card, however. "Throwing these two cultures together is ... an uncomfortable transition for a company to make," says Alison Smith, senior research analyst at AMR Research (Boston). There are disparate levels of knowledge between control and computer systems groups, different definitions of real time and different views of where budget money needs to go. Each group, she says, has its own myopic view of the world.
At Libbey Inc., a maker of glass and tableware, the IT and manufacturing engineering teams remain separate, but there are times when the groups must work cooperatively. Specifically, there are technology touch points between the J.D. Edwards ERP system and a homegrown production data collection system, called PRIME, that result in an overlap of responsibilities. To avoid any confusion, the company came up with a blueprint of sorts to map out the roles each group will play.
"You have to define between the two so you know who owns what in the organization, especially on the network side," says David Pindoley, business unit leader for manufacturing and engineering at Libbey's Toledo, OH, facility. Pindoley acts as a liaison between IT and engineering. "For any special projects relating to software, I bring the two groups together," he says. Almost like a mediator, Pindoley will facilitate communications, working out any issues between the groups and figuring out who is responsible for what.
The hurdle he often has to overcome is getting plant engineers, who are inclined to do everything themselves, to relinquish some of their responsibilities. "The teaming part is a tough back and forth with that mindset," Pindoley says. "You have to be able to show the value of [each group's] expertise when you start crossing the line."
Smith, who studied organizational behavior and also has an engineering background, saw the dimensions of that line firsthand while working for six months in an automotive company's paint shop. She was having problems getting data from an enterprise system that was running a robotics painting system. When she requested assistance from the IT group, the group declined to help. After some coaxing, they met on neutral ground -- in the cafeteria -- but the differences were clear. Smith, in blue jeans and steel toe boots, sat across from members of the IT group, who were dressed in shirts and ties, to discuss the problem. "Their attitude was that it wasn't their job to know what was happening in production. It didn't occur to them that if we had downtime because they were updating the system, it would shut down production," Smith says.
TRY TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE
More recently, AMR has been trying to educate IT on life beyond ERP, what it means to have production line responsibility and the repercussions of not meeting a deadline. As a corollary to that, Smith says the production staff needs to be gently guided into this decade. "There's a lot of knee-jerk resistance at the plant level."
Technology vendors such as SAP and Wonderware, an Invensys plc company, are also developing consulting practices to help cultural blending. Wonderware's Applications Consulting Services group educates companies on standards such as ISA 95 and OPC and advises on implementation direction and the formation of the appropriate teams to support Wonderware's ArchestrA integrated architecture. "The number one issue we are running into is culture," says Tim Sowell, vice president of Wonderware and ArchestrA strategy. "You can do [the technology deployment], but if you don't get the culture in place, there will be a number of areas in which it fails."
In Europe, Sowell says, the idea of a fused production/IT team is catching on. Production/IT is responsible for the networking in the plant, including Ethernet connections, hubs, servers and instances of SAP that touch the manufacturing environment. A separate group, called corporate IT, deals with enterprise desktops, servers and networking technology.
In order to better accommodate companies moving in this direction, Wonderware is evolving its own system integrator program to include people with an IT and automation background. Today, however, there's only a handful of individuals in that integration team that can work in both worlds, says Sowell.
Nurturing a cross-cultural environment is top on the to-do list at Fusion UV, where Mather is careful to place people in different departments. "We encourage people to move around the organization because each time they do so they bring with them what they learned from the last position," she says.
NOT JUST A NAME CHANGE
Chevron is creating the same kind of unity with a new global refining objective that complements the company's new corporate identity. In May, the company changed its name from ChevronTexaco to Chevron Corp. With the name change came a restructuring from a regional orientation to a global, functional organization, according to David Anderson, strategy and planning manager for Chevron's Global Refining Control & Information Systems (CIS).
In a presentation made in June at the ARC Advisory Group Performance Driven Manufacturing Forum in Boston, Anderson outlined how the company was creating "the refinery of the future," which operates with zero injuries, zero incidents and the highest possible financial performance. To reach that goal, a major part of the plan is a shared global portfolio of control and information systems. But just combining IT and process into one group that reports to the CIO is not enough. First, it has to be endorsed by top management and there needs to be a business model that supports the transformation. The model consists of a CIS leadership team, personnel development committee and program management office. "Learning to grow [requires] an aggressive strategy with a different mindset," Anderson says.
The mindset needs to penetrate the entire company, but it's important to understand the individuals who are the keys to driving the effort. According to John Zarb, president of ITinerantCIO, a CIO consulting firm, engineers are the critical conduit. Zarb says that because these are the people who design the machines, they can relate to people in production. At the same time, engineers garner respect from IT as they are highly-capable computer wizards. "I would put engineers in the middle of these two groups," Zarb says, reflecting on his own personal experience as a CIO in automotive and CPG companies. "I bought a lot of donuts for those people, and it worked."
Besides buying donuts, corporate executives need to take a long, hard look at where it is they want the company to be in the next five years. Figuring out the technology required to get there is obvious, deploying the applications is easy, and understanding the human needs that really drive the project's potential is the key to success.
"The driver is the need," according to Sudipta Bhattacharya, SAP's vice president of manufacturing applications. "The business need has never been greater, and companies are finding that ... technology can be a catalyst to drive the change in human behavior ... which can be a competitive edge for them."