16 January 2009

Extending a manufacturing platform across all operation facilities streamlines processes across the entire enterprise

By introducing more straightforward IT solutions, plantfloor and enterprise can achieve new levels of automation and efficiency.

In Aberdeen’s report Global Manufacturing Operations Management, the authors conclude that one of the required actions to improve manufacturing operations is to: “provide real-time visibility and establish automated workflows across manufacturing operations and supplier networks to manage adverse events.”

Aberdeen’s report states that best in class manufacturers are more than two and a half times as likely as industry average manufacturers to extend a manufacturing operations management platform across all manufacturing facilities. It also cites the use of supplier quality management and manufacturing intelligence as significant in best in class manufacturers compared with laggards.

These prerequisites to success demand that the barriers between plantfloor and enterprise-wide business tools, such as business intelligence (BI), are broken down. “There is a trend where we have IT getting directly involved in IT operations in manufacturing. CIOs are becoming responsible for everything above the PLC or HMI – in the manufacturing execution systems (MES) layer and above,” says Chris Colyer, worldwide solution director, manufacturing operations, Microsoft.

“Microsoft is the fundamental enabling technology that is creating an environment suitable for manufacturing operations. It’s easier to deploy, easier to manage and easier to maintain,” says Colyer, explaining that the technology breaks down into four areas: application platforms, BI and collaboration, integration and, finally, system management and virtualisation.

Microsoft’s application platforms, such as Windows Server and SQL Server, are what the company’s independent software vendors (ISVs) use to run their applications on. “We are about creating a platform that is cost efficient, easy to deploy and maintain, and we continue to work on that area,” says Colyer. “Initially it was all about the application platform but, having got that, we started looking at the BI and collaboration side. We looked at how do we become a core part of the development activity of our ISVs as they look to build our technologies into their applications.”

These technologies are SQL Server Analysis Reporting Services, and Performance Point Server for scorecarding applications, to provide a rich BI stack. For collaboration, Colyer points to SharePoint Portal Server and Live Communications Server that provides online ‘presence.’

“There’s an evolution in the way people gain visibility through collaboration,” says Colyer. “Predisys, for example, provides a consistent view of key performance indicators across the plant, so you can roll up and get visibility. Now there’s a move from showing performance indicators towards driving social networks across boundaries. When you are looking at manufacturing facilities, you’ll have one facility in one region, and another in another region. Those people may never sit in the same room together but they may have like jobs, like roles, like responsibilities. As you start exposing information around the business performance of the plant, you start creating an environment where the collaboration becomes easier and then it’s about putting systems and technologies in place to allow that to happen.”

Microsoft is the fundamental enabling technology that is creating an environment suitable for manufacturing operations

Chris Colyer, Microsoft The third area that Microsoft has worked on is integration from ERP to manufacturing operations and the cornerstone of that is BizTalk Server.

“BizTalk drives business process management orchestration, between your ERP system and your MES and various other systems,” says Colyer. He adds that most manufacturers will also have other fundamental systems that are critical in providing information, anything from financial ERP, supply chain systems and CRM, and some home-grown systems too. “BizTalk provides that orchestration and integration layer between those systems in a cost-efficient and scalable way.”

A fourth area that Colyer sees manufacturers taking an interest in is the systems management area and virtualis-ation, to create environments where IT is easier to deploy.

John Dijck, board member of the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) thinks the last decade has been a lost opportunity for most manufacturers, who have not been adding steadily to their IT infrastructures to take advantage of real-time data and its analysis – in some cases because it’s been an unaffordable luxury, in others because specifications for IT upgrades have missed off vital automation infrastructure. Ten years on, there are more machines and applications but they are no better connected. “Even in a fully-automated plant,” says Dijck, “you’d be surprised how much paper is involved.”

Maryanne Steidinger, MES and EMI marketing programme manager at Wonderware summarises the problems manufacturers face in this regard: lack of qualified personnel to train on, implement, and maintain the infrastructure; lack of consistency in operations – if the process is heavily manual, such as in food inspection or box build, it may be problematic to add automation such as data collection or RFID; and cost – a company must strategically decide that it wants to add automation to its operations. “The cost is more than just the price of the hardware and software,” adds Steidinger. “The company must add annual support costs, training, and sometimes reconfiguration of operations to make them more automation friendly.”

Dassault Systèmes says that manufacturing companies face the problem of legacy systems that are not fully integrated but which allow them to function, albeit without the efficiencies automation can provide. Because of this, companies see change as high risk and overcoming that risk requires proven technology and an understanding by companies that the risk of doing nothing may have consequences that have very significant costs. Dassault Systèmes argues for a change in business processes to develop collaboration between product and manufacturing engineering, which has proved to provide cost savings through resolving errors early in the process.

Complexity, caused by having many different vendors’ systems deployed over many years, has prevented increased automation, says Thomas Burke, OPC Foundation president and executive director. Manufacturers want best of breed and they want interoperability. The significance of IT standards is therefore increasing as a mechanism for application to application integration.

Technologies such as wireless networking provide manufacturers with options to develop in the right direction but they need to apply some disciplined long-term investment rather than buying equipment that maintains plants based on manual data entry processes and uninstrumented processes. Dijck praises the work of OPC and others to provide means of communication between disparate systems. “The unified approach to communications to the shopfloor device is crucial,” he says.

Dijck points out that a manufacturer typically builds up a large inventory of best of breed applications to carry out vital tasks, whether that’s on the plantfloor – tracking machine maintenance for example – or in the office – for logistics planning, scheduling and so on. Interoperability between these applications is equally important as with the plantfloor but the complexity can become overwhelming.

MESA is trying to drive forward how manufacturing people can get access to plant and wider business information to solve the bigger problems. One way of achieving this without ripping and replacing is to bring the new wave of business process management to bear on the problem. This is where IT staff can help operations staff by capturing business process and the data associated with it and displaying it in a way that makes sense.

“It is very important in the manufacturing world that the IT infrastructure at the shopfloor level provides the greatest degree of secure reliable interoperability,” says Burke. “The focus of OPC UA collaborating with the IT standards organisations is all about providing secure reliable interoperability for data and information integrity from the shopfloor to the top floor.” Burke says that manufacturers need to design systems from the beginning that can incorporate the most secure and reliable protocols. Otherwise, they risk compromising functionality and incurring many times the base cost.

Steidinger develops the point that manufacturing execution systems (MES) are already developing into not just plant-wide systems, but corporate-based standard products whereby one application can be deployed not only at a single plant but as a company-wide tool: “This standardisation is probably the strongest benefit of MES. Just as ERP standardised business with a common language and views of an organisation, MES is doing the same for operations, engineering, quality and manufacturing IT.”

Colyer says Microsoft has customers today that are taking native plantfloor information, from HMI and SCADA systems, putting it through a SQL analysis cube and driving reporting services from that. “They can pick off a couple of KPIs that tell them how that plant is performing – against budget, against uptime – and they can bubble those up in a way that is visible to other people in the organisation.”

He adds that when partners get involved, they take this scenario to a higher evolution, and create bidirectional information flows, so that managers not only understand what’s taking place in terms of plant, but can also make decision support forwards and backwards. He mentions Nypro and Lyondell as manufacturers using BizTalk and collaboration with SharePoint to achieve this.

Dassault Systèmes concludes that the ultimate goal of any manufacturing environment is to foster a continuous improvement model that is inherent to the overall business model. The technology to accomplish this is available and proven to ensure bidirectional communication between the shopfloor and top floor through virtual simulation techniques that emulate and can control or monitor the enterprise in real-time.

As part of this model, engineering processes should not only be used to replicate validated and proven engineering elements but should also be used to re-engineer and re-purpose those elements in subsequent projects. Software captures the intellectual process of the projects as well as the best practices that can be used for new product introduction, new model designs or planning for expansion of facilities to meet market demand.

Steidinger adds that several automation and MES providers have created relationships with PLM companies to create ‘digital factories’, providing the ability to visualise a product transitioning from engineering design to manufacturing without physically having the plant or the prototypes built. This is especially attractive to manufacturers in the discrete industries, where long runs of product, uninterrupted, are desired for maximum profitability.

This article first appeared in issue 15 of Prime magazine.

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