Our purpose is to help you better engage yourself in all areas of the changing manufacturing process. In this way only, can your company achieve the systematic, unified process that will insure future success.
These words, written by Managing Automation's founding publisher Ralph E. Richardson in this publication's inaugural issue, are as true today as they were in May 1986. Richardson's pronouncement was driven as much by research as it was by the intuition that manufacturing was entering a new phase in its metamorphosis. Manufacturing was then a highly complex endeavor that mandated the careful collection and analysis of digital bits and bytes to drive business strategy and execution as much as it required more flexible operational processes inside and outside the plant's four walls.
Richardson's brainstorm came well before the browser transformed the Internet from a network through which academics and researchers could share scientific research into a worldwide conduit for commercial and aesthetic pursuits. It came before China emerged as the world's low-cost competitor for assembling everything from electronic components to auto parts, apparel, and toys. It also preceded the rise of India as a global customer service powerhouse and software factory. Lastly, it came as corporate America's love affair with information technology was heating up. But it would be years before even starry-eyed futurists would declare that IT and all forms of factory automation were merely a means to an end -- not the end-all, be-all productivity accelerator that white-glove consultants were vigorously promoting at the time as the elixir for unlocking competitive advantage.
The "systematic, unified process" Richardson foresaw would require radical changes in business models -- as well as altered organizational and cultural thinking -- that only today are starting to take hold. Seamless process integration would require domestic manufacturers to pare back traditional top-down thinking and embrace bottom-up empowerment of factory floor workers to seek continuous improvements that eliminated waste from the manufacturing process. Achieving process integration would also require manufacturers to focus on core strengths and outsource non-strategic functions. This would mean that in their efforts to minimize costs and maximize return on assets manufacturers would need to make a critical leap of faith to rely on outsiders to handle some business disciplines that theretofore were considered indispensable to manufacturing: product design, subassembly, logistics management, customer service, and IT. Such a transformation would require business processes and data to be tightly intertwined, while demanding near ubiquitous access to it.
Offshoring, outsourcing, data and business process integration, and lean manufacturing are today's manufacturing business imperatives. And they have been squarely in MA's editorial lens over the past 20 years. In fact, almost all of these concepts were covered in painstaking detail by the magazine over the years using slightly different buzz phrases. Other trends, such as computer-integrated manufacturing, robotics, and artificial intelligence, may have been overplayed, but were clear signs of their time. MA, like its technology publication brethren, wasn't immune to the heavy hype that has always characterized the technology business.
What follows is a look at key trends MA got right and some it got wrong over the past two decades.
1986-1995
CIM's High Hopes
MA readers were treated to a heavy dose of CIM -- computer-integrated manufacturing -- during the magazine's formative years. Nothing wrong with the concept; it clearly set the stage for the integrated enterprise applications stacks and factory floor interoperability initiatives that followed. The concept of built-in application interface standardization that would enable a more programmatic approach to keeping design, production, planning, and accounting processes in sync was -- and remains -- the Holy Grail of manufacturing. By July 1988, MA found that companies implementing CIM had realized they needed a "CIM Team" to get projects off the ground. In June 1991, an article entitled "CIM's Missing Link" made clear that internecine turf wars -- not technology -- were a roadblock to CIM's success. In reality, the concept was too inwardly focused to give domestic manufacturers the competitive edge they longed for.
"We covered manufacturing, as did many other magazines, from inside the factory walls," notes Robert Malone, a current MA columnist who was the publication's editor in the late 1980s through late 1990s. "At the time, people were talking about smokestacks in terms of individual cores -- design core, man core, etc. ... There was some partial recognition by companies in the business that manufacturing occurred beyond the four walls."
The problem with CIM, notes AMR Research VP Bill Swanton, was that the concept was a great theory that was difficult to execute. "One of the key things everyone realized is that we can't schedule everything or figure out what a plant can do and plan accordingly," Swanton says. "People are more creative than computer programs. Too often this industry tried to take out the human element."
The CIM concept also couldn't be achieved without a significant investment, adds Andy Chatha, president and founder of ARC Advisory Group (Dedham, MA), a manufacturing research company that has also tracked industry developments since 1986. "It was too big a vision" for manufacturers to attain, he says, particularly since the upfront input it required was at odds with resource-challenged outfits that thought and acted more incrementally.
The concept has evolved, Chatha notes, into what many people now call "the digital factory" which includes supply network planning with key partners both onshore and offshore. "Right now the vision... is what we really need to compete with foreign manufacturers," he says.
Robotics & AI
MIT professor Marvin Minsky told MA in January of 1988 that American factory workers have nothing to fear from artificial intelligence and robotics. These technologies, he argued, will transform American industry, but will not obviate the need for human beings on the manufacturing lines. He was partially right; outside the automotive industry, most American workers would not be replaced by intelligent robots. It was lower-cost foreign labor that domestic workers needed to be worried about.
"We got very involved in AI. We thought it was a panacea that solved all forms of integration," MA's Malone says. "It turned out to be the hole of the bagel."
The problem with AI, according to ARC's Chatha, was that it was beyond most manufacturers' financial and technical means. "Prices are finally starting to come down," Chatha says, noting that elements of AI are now used in manufacturing but are not referred to as such. "It is called simulation and... it is a driving force in the virtual factory today."
On the robotics front, the cost savings potential of workforce reductions gave way to the cruel reality that significant capital would be required to redesign production lines to accommodate automated machine assembly, recalls AMR's Swanton. Rather than simplifying matters, companies began to realize that they were "over automating" things in ways that required "heavy capitalization" and were not achieving the flexibility and cost reductions they had initially envisioned, he notes.
Today, robots are relegated to highly repetitive and dangerous tasks, a role that workers and management concur makes the most sense.
The Lights-Out Factory
Marrying an intelligent infrastructure to CIM and its plant-floor control, AI, and robotics was the key to creating the long-sought "lights-out factory," a concept that MA visited periodically in its early days.
"It's one thing [that was] heard over and over again," Swanton says. "It would erase all of the issues of labor, cost, quality. We would automate everything and the factory would just keep humming." It took working form as an academic process, he says, but it never crossed the chasm into reality.
The only thing "lights-out" about manufacturing, unfortunately, became the prevalence of factory closures in the years that would follow.
1996-2006
All Things Internet
The development of the Web browser to complement the emergence of technical protocols such as TCP/IP for data communication and HTML and HTTP for page description transport transformed the Internet into a medium that embraced everything from personal expression and exploration to commercial information sharing and business transactions. The question was: How would "the Net" be secured to make large corporations more comfortable conducting business online?
Web-enabled applications, which replaced the previous generation of client-server programs, opened the way for manufacturers to build more collaborative business processes. It started with electronic marketplaces -- or exchanges -- that would "dis-intermediate" middlemen, enabling manufacturers to buy and sell commodity parts via Internet portals at lower costs and balance supply with demand. In fact, an MA survey of readers in March 2000 revealed that manufacturing companies were pushing ahead with e-business strategies, but were struggling with ROI justification. Pioneers said the solution was simple: Let business strategy guide the way. But only a few manufacturers made significant progress before the Internet bubble burst, ARC's Chatha says.
Like many publications, MA spilled a lot of ink covering emerging electronic marketplaces. Feature articles such as "The New B2B Markets" (December 2001) talked about the evolution of marketplaces into all-encompassing, hosted collaborative environments that opened up new ways of researching and buying products as well as identifying and qualifying new suppliers -- tasks unattainable in the years that preceded the commercial Internet. Other articles, such as a June 2001 piece entitled "Trading Exchange Platforms," and August 2001's "Integration Differentiates Portals, Exchanges," looked at the challenges marketplaces faced as they assumed more business-critical tasks. It was becoming clear that procurement cost and time savings were meaningless without tighter integration of electronic exchanges into the fabric of the manufacturing enterprise.
Electronic marketplace operators, recalls AMR's Swanton, weren't seeing huge dollars made on each transaction. "The different marketplaces did not solve a business problem," he argues. "People tried to take an eBay concept and translate it to manufacturing -- no one was able to do it."
The biggest flop was the automotive industry's Covisint (recently acquired by systems software vendor Compuware of Ann Arbor, MI), which was formed for what seemed to be all the right reasons. "In High Gear," a May 2005 story, spoke of AB Volvo's push to work more directly with suppliers due to Covisint's inability to build trusted relationships. "Covisint got the big three auto makers behind it, but suppliers have been suspicious of the online auction aspect of the Covisint model, so they haven't bought in," said AMR Research's Kevin Mixer at the time.
The situation is no better today. "Unfortunately, companies like GM sunk a lot of money into Covisint thinking it would solve their problems, but again people forgot that things in manufacturing move slowly," adds ARC's Chatha.
The Transition from MRP to ERP; the Rise of SAP
Throughout the 1990s the concept of integrated applications was the Holy Grail, as vendors poured more and more functionality into MRP software and began to transition from centralized computing architectures to emerging client-server environments. By 1992, Microsoft's Windows user interface began to emerge as the front end to most enterprise applications as well as factory automation systems, including SCADA. And, as MA chronicled, with improved usability came new data models to feed integrated financial accounting, customer management, supply planning, and plant-floor applications. The goal, similar to what Richardson had called for six years earlier, was to enable more streamlined business processes pivoting around a single version of the truth.
Client-server may have empowered users to do more on their own, but the newfangled enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications that arose from MRP II's ashes produced more configuration complexity than users had bargained for. These applications kept systems integrators and business consultants exceedingly busy -- and wealthy -- and left manufacturers scratching their heads in search of elusive ROI. By June 1996, ERP was already the largest segment of the manufacturing software market, MA reported.
At the forefront of the trend was SAP (Walldorf, Germany). MA was all over SAP's emergence as its R/3 system transitioned to the more flexible mySAP ERP and as client-server technology gave way to Web portals and other Internet-enabled applications. This culminated in MA's early coverage of NetWeaver in May of 2004 and a soup-to-nuts reality check in a February 2005 piece, "Unraveling SAP's NetWeaver."
"SAP was at the right time and right place in this world," ARC's Chatha concludes.
Meanwhile, the shift to the new Web-based applications paradigm presaged a consolidation of the enterprise applications market, which MA aggressively covered.
Lean Manufacturing
While well aware of the lean manufacturing philosophy espoused and fine-tuned by the Toyota Motor Corp. over the last half century, replete with Kanbans (demand signal visibility) and Kaizen (continuous business process improvement), it has only been in the last few years that MA has thoroughly explored the underlying concepts. Articles such as August 2004's "Lean and Obese"; March 2005's "The Art of Lean"; and October 2005's "What's Holding Back Lean?" exploded lean's myths and explored the concept's utility to U.S. manufacturers. These pieces provided a heavy dose of actionable insight on how to move forward and how to avoid the roadblocks to lean that domestic manufacturers have encountered.
The PLC and DCS Evolve; FieldBus Standard Emerges
Programmable logic control (PLC) had been around many years, starting as dedicated hardware devices that replaced rigid, wire-ridden electro-mechanical relay panels, and eventually emerging as software that could run on general purpose, low-cost PCs. The distributed control system (DCS) debuted in 1975, ARC says, but didn't begin its digital evolution until the early 1990s -- and, of course, MA followed the progression almost every step of the way.
ARC analyst Larry O'Brien told MA in August 2005 that DCS is evolving into CPAS, or a collaborative process automation system. "It is moving toward a system architecture that encompasses a lot of things the DCS didn't traditionally encompass, such as operations and production management, logic control, continuous batch, and integrated safety."
Similarly, the traditional PLC is morphing into what ARC dubs the programmable automation controller (PAC), which blends logic, motion, and process control on a common development platform to speed deployment and ease the learning curve.
For years these devices and their software successors were somewhat proprietary. Their proliferation within manufacturing, however, created the need for a new global standard for device communications -- which begot the fieldbus standard in 1992 and led to the formation of the Fieldbus Foundation in the fall of 1994. Only recently has seamless device interoperability moved closer to becoming a reality.
Auto-ID Goes Real-Time
Bar coding was always a staple of MA's coverage: Witness the September 1992 story that detailed new bar code standards and advances that were making it easier for manufacturers to coordinate production with distribution, ensuring that orders matched shipments. Sounds a lot like the hype that has surrounded radio frequency identification technology?
MA picked up the trail of RFID in the early 1990s and followed it through a number of would-be breakouts. To MA's credit, the publication wasn't convinced that the first-generation technologies were ready for prime time. Articles like July 2004's "RFID Hype or Real Deal?"; or May 2005's "RFID's Future: The Real Issues," helped readers realize the hard work involved.
Product Development's Alphabet Soup
MA covered the trials and tribulations of early efforts by manufacturers to track all product-development information generated throughout the enterprise, and make this data available to the various departments within the company, as well as to customers, suppliers, and trading partners. By the mid-1990s the concept was called collaborative product commerce (CPC).
By the late 1990s, the concept began to morph into what we today call product lifecycle management (PLM), MA's archives reveal. The new name reflected the expanded capabilities of PDM, which was seen as a starting point for building applications that encourage and enable collaboration.
By September of 2001, the PLM nomenclature seemed commonplace. A cover story entitled "PLM: The Next Enterprise Application" examined how IT's crème de la crème -- IBM, SAP, PTC, and EDS (via its acquisitions of UGS and SDRC) -- planned to satisfy the growing demand for intra- and inter-enterprise collaboration through PLM environments.
By mid-decade, manufacturers were looking to integrate service and support data into PLM as well as assess hosted application services and whether the technology was better than ERP or MES at helping to manage regulatory compliance. Clearly, PLM was evolving to meet the needs of product development dispersed across a global team, and was considered central to helping manufacturers sharpen their competitive edge through more timely and cost-effective innovation.
Working into the Future
Unlike most of its primary competitors, MA has followed manufacturing's progress across disciplines -- from engineering and factory-floor technologies critical to the rank and file through back-office systems of interest to white-collar knowledge workers and "C" level executives. MA has always taken a strategic bent, though the publication in the early days was more heavily weighted toward schematics and "how-to" stories devoted to connecting the technology dots.
Through economic cycles thick and thin, finding, training, and retaining the right mix of skilled and non-skilled workers has always been on MA's agenda. A November 1986 article offers advice on how to fill advanced manufacturing jobs with qualified workers. The challenge has only gotten bigger this millennium as China and India now graduate many more manufacturing engineers, plant managers, and others pursuing more technical careers than the U.S.
Today, the situation has become so dire that industry organizations have gone on the offensive. MA has covered moves by the National Council for Advanced Manufacturing (NACFAM) to offer certification standards and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to create programs to stimulate interest in manufacturing jobs (and awareness of the problem on Capitol Hill). MA even included "Training Mastery" among the key pillars that underpin its Progressive Manufacturing philosophy, which debuted in June 2004.
Clearly, the manufacturing industry has come a long way in the last two decades. As Ralph Richardson noted in his first "Letter From the Publisher," automating a manufacturing facility is a "complex, step-by-step process that must be carried out within a long-range plan that leads to total integration." Alas, total integration remains a work in progress. The thoughts and deeds necessary to complete this adventure should make the next 20 years even more compelling for MA to chronicle.