Attempting to shine a light on that dark area, Aberdeen Group recently released a report detailing what's tripping up companies and offering advice on how to move toward best-in-class manufacturing.
The December 2005 report, "Manufacturing Transparency: Turning Visibility into Value," is based on a survey of 75 manufacturers across discrete, process, and consumer product industries. Results show that each industry is facing its own challenges in achieving visibility. According to the report, 63% of discrete manufacturers have no unified view of plant floor information because the systems are not integrated. For process manufacturers, 56% say there's a major bottleneck between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and factory floor systems. And among consumer products companies, 67% say their biggest obstacle to overcome is a lack of visibility into lean operations. Other burdens include too many complex systems, too little standardization; the inability to detect and anticipate factory floor issues, and a gap between process control and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Another, less obvious shortfalling is the inability to obtain useful plant floor financial information. According to Jane Biddle, Aberdeen's vice president of manufacturing research, companies bought ERP systems expecting to gain visibility into production, and they've been disappointed. "The question is, given the [manufacturing] systems they currently have, how do they figure out what is going on down there?" she asks.
Executives need -- and want -- dashboards that show real-time plant information, Biddle says. "Not that an executive needs to know what is going on every second, but if there's a quality problem...they need to respond in real-time."
The report highlights four manufacturers that have found the right formula for their business. Tyson Foods' "Perfect Order" strategy uses value-stream mapping techniques to document and model major end-to-end process flows, tasks, and activities to deliver actionable information to the right individual. Ralco Industries uses technology to integrate engineering and manufacturing systems, procedures, and quality standards, and gain visibility into both material and production operations. Rexam leverages manufacturing intelligence software to capture performance data and synchronize it with management and production processes in real-time. And Dow Corning aggregates customer- and product-related data in an integrated information framework.
Aberdeen applied a methodology it calls "PACE" to benchmark the research -- a concept that involves evaluating the business pressures, actions, capabilities and enablers. Collectively, these four exemplary companies and the survey data contributed to Aberdeen's final findings: Best-of-breed companies recognize that achieving visibility into the manufacturing black hole requires real-time accounting practices coupled with factory automation, consolidated metrics, standardized processes, and best practices.
This article originally appeared in the February 2006 issue of Managing Automation magazine.