HANNOVER, GERMANY — The promise that integrated technology will tie together shop floor, development, and enterprises will never materialize unless manufacturers make concurrent cultural and process changes.
That message resonated this week at Manufacturing Executive magazine’s Manufacturing Executive Leadership Forum here at the Hannover Fair, where top decision makers from L’Oréal, race car specialist McLaren Electronic Systems, and “lean” prize-winning German-Japanese joint venture Freudenberg-NOK articulated their visions and strategies for excellence. Analysts from CIMdata, Cambashi, Manufacturing Insights, and others also weighed in with intermittently contentious and harmonic insights on what works in the pursuit of excellence and what does not.
But almost everyone agreed that the most sophisticated technologies for integrating automation, PLM, ERP, and MES systems will flop if companies don’t make requisite organizational changes — which often come with considerable pain.
“Don’t start any such project without a bodyguard,” quipped Jacques Playe, CIO of operations for French cosmetics powerhouse L’Oréal, during one of the featured presentations at the three-day event. Playe has been leading a massive technology integration project that ties SAP ERP software into Apriso MES software on the factory floor, across factories in Europe and the Americas that churn out brands including Garnier, Giorgio Armani, Lancôme, Matrix, Redkin, and Ralph Lauren.