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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff   Like their counterparts at many large manufacturing companies, officials at Pratt & Whitney Canada over the years often considered the benefits of integrating the real-time shop floor systems at the company's Montreal aircraft engine manufacturing plant with its SAP enterprise applications. Until recently, however, P&WC shied away from such a plan, which it saw as fraught with complexity and risk. "We have just about all the brands and versions of plant floor equipment that you can imagine," says Claude Poliquin, business development manager at Pratt & Whitney Canada (Longueuil, Quebec). "That made it a very complex task to connect those all in real time to SAP." Eighteen months ago, however, concerns about complexity gave way to business imperatives. P&WC customers were demanding detailed, real-time, part-by-part quality information on the engines they were buying. At the same time, P&WC was gearing up to produce a new, small turbofan engine designed for a new generation of inexpensive "air taxi" commercial aircraft. P&WC's business plan called for the company to produce one of the new engines every 12 hours, a rate 30 times faster than the company's typical production turnaround. [Click to continue] |