Congratulations. It’s been a long, sometimes grim haul, but your company has made it through the worst of the recession more or less intact. You may have lost a few shaky suppliers and maybe even a plant or two, but customers are beginning to stir and orders are coming back.
Now you face a new challenge. With capital still tight and significant investment in new plants and equipment unlikely, you have to find a way to do more with what you’ve got. You need to be able to quickly assess changes in demand, make the right call on where to schedule production to maximize both customer service and profit, and then rapidly reconfigure your plants, minimizing downtime, scrap, and other waste.
“What we’re looking for now is real-time adaptability,” says Thomas Howe, chief architect for global manufacturing at General Motors. “We need to have the ability to reconfigure our production environment based on business drivers and demand with as little cost as possible. In order to do that, we have to use the same processes in every plant worldwide. And we need data in a consistent format and fully integrated, from the plant to the enterprise.”
For the past five years, Howe has spearheaded a series of projects aimed at achieving affordable, standards-based plant-to-enterprise integration company-wide.