As manufacturers push to respond with more agility to accelerating rates of change, technology vendors increasingly are supporting that drive with a wide range of new software tools. Among them are tools that provide manufacturers with highly usable, real-time information about what's going right and wrong on the plant floor and across supply networks. Vendors also are focusing on tools that allow manufacturers to quickly make decisions and take action based on that real-time visibility. And, finally, software vendors are making strides to make their own products more flexible and better able to change as business imperatives shift.
"Today manufacturers need a mix of real-time data that can give them a bird's eye view of what's going on at any minute as well as an ability to deal with problems as soon as they happen," says Romain LeVault, vice president of sales and business development at manufacturing operations management software vendor Intercim LLC.
Intercim, like some other providers, is developing software that will not only provide manufacturers with real-time plant floor information, but also let them easily visualize and react to shop floor events and exceptions.
In June, Intercim sealed a joint development deal with product lifecycle management software provider Dassault Systèmes that will create a tight integration between the two companies' products. That integration will let manufacturers easily model and visualize plant equipment and processes in real time, with Dassault's V6 PLM platform providing the 3D modeling and visualization capability, and Intercim's MOM software providing real-time plant floor data. Using 3D plant models, managers would be able to easily see whether a machine on the shop floor is working and the status of a given production process in a local or remote plant. Managers would be able to instantly provide work instructions to a specific plant cell to resolve nonconforming situations.
LeVault, who calls the concept a "manufacturing control tower," says the project started with a request from Boeing, a Dassault and Intercim customer that wanted to eliminate paper-based plant floor processes as a way to become more responsive.
"What we're really talking about is agility through visibility," LeVault says.
Other vendors are also embracing new technologies that will permit real-time plant floor visualization. Rockwell Automation, for example, recently enhanced its FactoryTalk View plant visualization software by enabling it to work with Microsoft's Silverlight technology, a Web browser plug-in and set of programming tools that allows for the delivery of rich video and visualizations over Web browsers. The technology, Rockwell says, will allow managers to visually track plant events remotely.
In a similar way, other software vendors are working on improving real-time visibility into and visualization of other parts of the manufacturing enterprise. ERP software provider QAD Inc., for example, is one of several vendors beginning to offer secure, shared online portals that manufacturers and their suppliers can use to track and visualize events in real time. QAD's Supply Visualization module allows manufacturers and suppliers to share demand, shipping, and other information.
"When a supplier has just released an advance ship notice, their manufacturing customer can instantly see that and track it in real time," says Gordon Fleming, QAD's chief marketing officer. "A few years ago, agility meant responding to customer needs from within the four walls of the enterprise. Now it means responding quickly throughout the supply chain."
Enterprise software provider Lawson Software also has launched technology that provides real-time supply chain visibility, but with a slightly different spin. The company's M3 Trace Engine 3.0 is designed specifically for food, beverage, and other process manufacturers that increasingly are expected to guarantee product safety by providing up-to-the-minute information on product content, origins, and transportation.