At the plant floor level, say leading automation technology vendors, much of the focus for 2006 will be on improving efficiency by collecting information generated by intelligent field devices and seamlessly integrating it with business applications to deliver a comprehensive, up-to-the minute view of the business.
Interestingly, according to these same vendors, much of the technology needed to enable this bottom-up approach to operations is already in place.
"All of the automation companies will be talking about a bottom-up approach, and I personally believe it is important," said Dick Hill, vice president of manufacturing services at ARC Advisory Group (Dedham, MA). "If you look at it from a manufacturing point of view, this is where you can really measure what you are doing. It can't be measured from an ERP system. It has to be done from the plant floor."
Rockwell Automation (Milwaukee, WI) calls this "information-enabled automation," an approach which is being made easier by W3 standards, XML, and process standards like B2MML (business-to-manufacturing markup language), says Rockwell CTO Sujeet Chand. As a result, Rockwell is moving heavily into a service-oriented architecture model with new integration and asset management service modules rolling out early in 2006.
To the same end, companies like ABB are focusing their energy on a second generation of intelligent field devices that provide a wider range of functions and acquire more information than prior versions. "These devices already have a healthy amount of on-board intelligence, such as the ability to report their health back to the control system using smart sensors and detect potential problems," said Bob Hausler, ABB's vice president of Industrial IT Systems Marketing. "Going forward, we will see field devices that will be able to perform inferential modeling to determine asset or equipment performance, advanced process control and other higher-level optimization functions."
Ultimately, integrating such plant floor-generated information with business systems "will allow customers to break down the islands of organization," says Peter Martin, vice president of performance management at Invensys Process Management (Foxboro, MA). According to Martin, integrating plant floor and business systems will allow manufacturers to do things like cost accounting in real time at the plant floor level.
Like automation technology vendors, leading suppliers of enterprise applications predict that in 2006 manufacturers will need to seamlessly integrate more of their value chains in order to take on global competition.
As original equipment manufacturers increasingly turn over more new product design responsibility to suppliers, for example, they will need to implement product portfolio management systems that not only coordinate product development efforts but also collaboratively capture customer requirements and manage product profitability, predicts Bryan Stolle, CEO at Agile Software Corp. (San Jose, CA).
Officials at Hewlett-Packard agree with that assessment. In fact, says Neal Elgersma, director of discrete manufacturing industries worldwide, the company is making a major investment to enter the PLM space as a service provider, partnering with PLM software vendor UGS (Plano, TX).
Of course, manufacturers in 2006 will be dealing with more than just globalization. High energy and transportation costs will continue to be realities, as will regulation, leading technology providers predict. In order to control transportation costs, says Graeme Cooksley, executive vice president at SSA Global Technologies Inc. (Chicago), manufacturers will need to invest more in transportation management systems and more time in streamlining collaboration with transportation service providers.
In order to cope with increasing regulations while cutting costs, automotive and high-tech manufacturers in particular will need to focus in the next year on automating post-sales business processes, particularly warrantee management, predicts HP's Elgersma.
"Two of the companies with the highest warranty spending are General Motors and Ford," says Elgersma. "The costs are huge, and the savings go right to the bottom line."
This article was repurposed from the December 2005 issue of Managing Automation magazine.