By Gordon Benzie
Every
manufacturing organization must have a resilient operations strategy. After
all, manufacturers are in the business of making products. You can’t make
products if systems, equipment or processes are down. If this core competency
can’t be consistently executed, significant risk exists at continued viability
and survival.
Production
processes are not simply put in place and forgotten. They must be carefully
examined, modified and continuously improved over time. Those responsible for
maintaining production throughput understand that systems must be put in place
to ensure continued performance. In aggregate, these systems comprise an Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) solution,
which essentially provide the “eyes and ears” of when a possible production
issue has occurred, or is about to occur.
Given the
importance of architecting such a solution, considerable research has been done
on how to best implement. IDC Manufacturing Insights identifies several factors to
consider when selecting an EMI provider. Not surprisingly, the choice has
little to do with “speeds” or “feeds.”
Based on this
report, here are six key factors you should consider when evaluating your manufacturing
intelligence strategy, and what solution provider you consider to partner with
to implement:
Industry experience: Does the
vendor have a track record in your industry? Does the vendor understand
not just what the metrics are but also what they mean and how certain
processes influence performance? Choosing an experienced partner is a top
priority.
Analytics data model: Closely
related to experience is the availability of a pre-built model of common
metrics and analytics data for manufacturing. The most time-consuming
elements of any implementation are creating a model and achieving
organizational consensus for it. A provider with a vetted model will get
you to implementation and benefit realization in half the time.
Actionable collaboration
mechanism: Intelligence is of much less value if it is difficult
to take immediate action on the information. Look for a vendor that has a
collaboration story, preferably one that includes an industry-accepted ad
hoc standard.
Mobility: The vendor
should have a well-developed approach to delivering intelligence to mobile
devices. Operations managers may not be road warriors, but they are
certainly "campus warriors" on the plant floor and in meetings rather than
at their desk. This means they need information to make decisions more
quickly on more portable devices such as smart phones or tablets. Time is
money – especially when tasked with production performance management.
Make sure your partner can support a range of form factors.
Global experience: The ideal
vendor has a proven track record in rolling out systems for globally
integrated companies. Even if you don’t operate across multiple countries,
it is highly likely you operate across a distributed environment. And, you
likely have suppliers operating different locations. The future of EMI
must include expanded supply chain visibility – assume this capability
will be a requirement in the future, even if it isn't today.
Contextual awareness: Seek
a solution provider that offers products that are more than just “charts
and gauges” dashboards. While this type of product can unify performance
metrics, they lack the ability to provide situational context. An
application that can provide relevant, real-time context will be far
superior in supporting faster decision support. An added benefit would be
the ability to capture management actions so that the efficacy of
decisions can be evaluated and improved, essentially creating operational
management continuous improvement.
In the world
of production performance optimization, manufacturing intelligence solutions
play a critical role to maximizing uptime, efficiency and overall performance.
A movement toward a resilient operations strategy best begins with an
investment in a manufacturing intelligence solution. One that is part of your Manufacturing Execution System is ideal. The near-term
hard benefits are robust – and the long-term capabilities might just be the
difference between your organization being a leader or laggard in your
respective industry.
About The Author:
Gordon Benzie
is a resident blog-master at APRISO.com, responsible for keeping the
Manufacturing Transformation blog content fresh and interesting. While he isn't
doing that, he is managing awareness, content generation and brand marketing at
Dassault Systèmes, within the DELMIA brand. His posts will likely be commentary
and observations on recent industry trends, analyst insights or research
studies. Gordon is on Google+
©2016
Manufacturing Transformation Blog. This article is licensed by Original
Publisher Dassault Systèmes'
solutions for manufacturing under Creative Commons License.