Try explaining to an IT person why a 30-minute delay between the time a production order is confirmed and when it hits the ERP system is unacceptable and you'll likely be met by a blank stare. From an IT and accounting standpoint, it doesn't matter what time an order is posted. But from a manufacturing perspective, a delay builds waste into the system by causing materials to sit on skids in a staging area until the order is logged.
This simple example typifies the disconnect between IT and manufacturing, says John Hall, who experienced this very situation first hand. "IT figured that the 30-minute delay didn't hurt, but it was costing us in staging and extra work," says Hall, director of supply chain systems at NIBCO Inc., a flow control product manufacturer in Elkhart, IN.
In order to fix the problem, Hall first had to clearly communicate the consequences. Now, much of Hall's role consists of conveying business needs to both IT and manufacturing, and coordinating the ERP system to better reflect lean processes on the factory floor.
IT/Automation Esperanto
Today's manufacturing environment is a mix of human interaction and technology efficiency. Hall and many other managers like him have learned that technology is the easy part when it comes to sharing information between the back office and the production floor. Middleware, Web services, and service-oriented architectures are making the vision of data exchange between the shop floor and the top floor a reality. Harnessing the technology, however, requires that IT and automation groups work collaboratively.
To date, it has been people, not technology, that have hampered such collaboration. Leadership -- or lack thereof -- is often blamed for the divide that remains between IT and automation teams. But the reality is that even the best leader will have a hard time merging cultures that are governed by different goals and speak different languages. Indeed, try explaining the intricacies of the PLC's rule-based ladder logic to a fresh-out-of-college techie who learned how to program in object-oriented Java. Moreover, try stressing that there can't be a 70-millisecond delay in a program because it slows down the machine cycle.
The proliferation of information across companies has been driving manufacturers to blend IT and automation teams. But there's an enormous knowledge gap between the two groups, and "talking it out" doesn't always help because each speaks a different language. Unity will never fully emerge without one important item: a universal language -- the manufacturing world's version of the international Esperanto language.
"It comes down to building a common lexicon of terms and definitions," says Gary Flum, general manager of advanced manufacturing solutions at QAD Inc.
Technology may be ubiquitous, but it is not homogeneous. While standards groups such as the OPC Foundation and the ISA-SP95 committee are starting to hammer out the details of a unified language for both manufacturing and enterprise applications, humans will need a translator for the foreseeable future. Flum calls this middleman a 'broker,' defined as a third party that steps in to act as the project arbitrator. Typically, it's the application vendor, like QAD, that is called in to "fix" a technology deployment. Too often, it's not the technology that's at fault, but rather a language barrier associated with the technology.
"The biggest contributor to the success of any integration project is having the people in there who can talk and understand all of the aspects, from the IT, the users', and the control engineers' perspectives," Flum says. "They have to be conversant in a common lexicon, and if they don't have that, it has to be developed or they won't succeed."
End-to-End Oversight
As technology changes manufacturing, manufacturing is asking its workers to change, too. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but never has it been clearer that individuals within an organization need to alter their behavior.
Case in point: the recent announcement that IBM Corp. will acquire MRO Software. The deal is a recognition that the traditional production assets on the manufacturing floor as well as the IT assets need to be managed in a similar manner. Other companies, including PAS Inc. and even the big automation vendors like Rockwell Automation, Siemens Energy & Automation Inc., and Honeywell Process Solutions are getting into automation asset management as well.
End-to-end IT asset management will force the conversation between the two worlds of IT and plant management, according to Alison Smith, a senior research analyst at AMR Research. "Sooner or later these two worlds will bump into each other and it will be a fist fight," she says. That's because the tools are already out there for IT asset management, and that's what the IT group will want to use, regardless of whether physical assets are covered.
To enable the conversation to take place, though, a new kind of leader needs to emerge. This person will come neither from IT nor from manufacturing. "The leader will come from a line of business and will be functionally focused," Smith says.
NIBCO's Hall has successfully implemented a functionally driven organization that hand-picks individuals for each technology project, based on knowledge and experience. The maker of flow control products has 11 plants, most of which are using SAP AG's ERP software for scheduling. On the plant floor, Informance International software is used to collect data, monitor machines, and avoid downtime. The plant is responsible for its own data, as is IT. But it is Hall's supply chain systems group that manages most of the projects.
"Before we put our group in place, many of the IT projects were ego trips and [were] never implemented because they didn't meet the requirements of the manufacturing plants or the distribution centers," Hall recalls. "The key is to make business own the projects. Someone on the functional side, a director or high-level manager, owns the project and they allocate resources to it... to make sure the right people are defining the requirements."
NIBCO approaches each project with a multi-step methodology. First, the management basics are outlined. This entails assigning an executive owner who builds a steering team. This core team is responsible for conducting a detailed analysis of the process in its current form and as it should be. Once the analysis is complete, the steering team calls in department sponsors to help execute the plan.
The most important element in each step is communication. A communication team -- which may be the core team that was established up front -- defines the problem and the solution, supervises testing, and sorts out terminology. These individuals also act as translators, because "a lot of times what people ask for is not what they really want," Hall says. "Somewhere along the line there has to be a check and balance."
Translators, QAD's Flum notes, will literally translate verbs and adjectives associated with technology definitions. It's an important role. "It means having a foot in both worlds and explaining what the issues are," he says.
There are some technologies now available that can "temper the tempers," including Online Development Inc.'s xCoupler. The configuration tool has been adopted by companies such as Rockwell Automation, which uses it to move data between its Logix processors and enterprise databases. xCoupler is not unlike some of the middleware approaches currently available, except that it is not application-specific, and it can populate multiple databases with one read of data. This eases the burden on people -- regardless of which group they are in -- to validate the accuracy of the data because it is all coming from the same source. "There needs to be something everyone can agree on," says Ron Monday, Online Development's president and CEO.
xCoupler is a big step forward in helping companies access one version of the truth, but the lingering problem is more social than technical. "It's two different mindsets," Monday says. "The guy in the front office wants data every eight hours, while the manufacturing guy is doing everything in real time."
Managing Emotion
When Robert Reed joined Coffee Bean International as vice president of manufacturing three years ago, there was no interaction between the IT department and the production floor, mainly because there were no computers in the plant and therefore no need for the IT group to get involved in what was brewing on the other side of the house. But Reed was responsible for moving production to an electronic format. And to do that, he needed IT.
"The first thing I did was get the IT department into the plant and let them tell me what they would do given the opportunity and the money," Reed says. "I also started looking for manufacturing people, be it machine operators or managers, who had a desire to develop IT skills or had an IT background."
The group Reed formed drove the entire project from beginning to end and was ultimately responsible for taking the paper out of the plant. What's more interesting is that the plant managers learned a new lifestyle. "The production and QA [quality assurance] managers are so involved with IT that they are almost a part of that department," Reed notes. They can even program and troubleshoot software.
It is, he says, "one big technology group." Granted, Coffee Bean International is a small, Portland, OR-based company of 125 employees, and therefore may be more manageable, but if the will of the employees is strong, it doesn't matter how many people are involved.
Motivational Drivers
What are the drivers that motivate teams to collaborate? A study of Johnson & Johnson's pharmaceuticals businesses conducted by researchers affiliated with the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations (EI Consortium) boiled it down to accountability, balance, and drivers that increase trust, ownership, and high performance within cross-functional teams. (See sidebar.)
Some of the findings from the J&J study are straightforward and easy to implement, such as aligning team goals with business, developing a clear and specific action plan, diligently documenting work, and conducting lessons-learned reviews. But other aspects of the study require people to step back from rigid rules and corporate governance, and inject some empathy into the initiative.
For example, understanding and valuing team members is one key driver. According to the report, "Team success is linked to team-member willingness to learn and understand each other's attitudes, views, work styles, hot buttons, and cultural differences... Members of the high-performance teams consistently and frequently told us that they knew each other quite well -- well enough to understand each other's idiosyncrasies." And they used this knowledge to facilitate work. Another key driver to success that the report uncovered is optimism.
While the J&J study didn't specifically address the issue of blending IT and automation groups, "I've found that humans are humans and much of the dynamics in cross-functional teams are similar across industries [and] levels," says Vanessa Druskat, a contributor to the J&J report and an associate professor of organizational behavior and management at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire.
The idea of mixing emotion with business was brought to light in Dr. Daniel Goleman's 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence. The theory suggests that self awareness, self management, social awareness, optimism, and empathy can enhance productivity at work, not to mention in other aspects of life.
Indeed, even technology vendors are taking a step back to look at the big picture when trying to solve application issues.
"I believe [that] in any organization driven by human beings, it all comes down to psychology as to what gets done at the end of the day," says Claus Abildgren, marketing program manager of production and performance management software for Wonderware Inc.
Reed echoes those thoughts. "What doesn't work is putting IT in a corner and telling them to do it." With that approach, he says, "You get something that costs a lot of money and will continue to cost money because you'll always be coming back to fix it."
Ultimately, in order to unite IT and automation teams, manufacturers will need to change their corporate cultures. They will need to align every department around a common goal, find a way to communicate effectively -- be it via a translator/broker or through the creation of their own lingo -- and, most importantly, learn to surrender some liberties. The effort can be much like a mediation session where all parties sit around a table and wrestle with the problem in front of them.
"You have to divorce yourself from fighting for control and all commit to solving the problem," says AMR's Smith.