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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Wednesday, December 13, 2006 4:55:45 PM   | Abstract: | Human nature, not technology, is the biggest obstacle to getting IT and automation teams to unite. New leadership and a universal language can help engender a cultural shift. |
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." Page : 1 2 3 4 ... NEXT |