Manufacturing Transformation Through The Advent Of The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise

Abstract: Informational Adequacy complemented by Business Intelligence and Exception Management and supported by a robust Knowledge Management infrastructure is essential to support the manufacturing requirements of agility and responsiveness. The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise envisages an integrated information model, one that spans across the entire enterprise regardless of size, geography or complexity. This would integrate multiple tiers of applications such as plant automation systems, manufacturing execution systems and enterprise applications in order to drive planning and execution closely together. A business process management approach is centric to the creation of the digital manufacturing enterprise. The multiplicity of value chain partners in product delivery also calls for an integration of supply chain partners across their core activities based on value deliveries to compete with other supply chains. THE DRIVERS TO MANUFACTURING TRANSFORMATION Change in the manufacturing industry is ubiquitous and can be seen across the competitive landscape, changing customer needs, newer manufacturing technologies, use of information technology, governmental and environmental regulations and the larger macro-economical trends. The Internet has created a level playing field by making information publicly available across industries. Simultaneously, global trade barriers are undergoing significant changes and have driven manufacturing into revisiting their manufacturing strategies and operations. The most

Removal Of Global Trade Barriers

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Ma

ile ing Ag ctur fa nu

Mass Customization

THE MANUFACTURING RESPONSE

Supply Chain Integration

Informational Availability & Global Access

e Tim ce et du ark Re o M T

Co lla bo De Prod rati sig uc ve n/E t ng g.

prominent trends in manufacturing are in terms of setting up globally distributed manufacturing facilities (where it is most cost effective), a move towards mass customization and focused initiatives on enabling reduction in time to market. The industry response to such needs of increased customer responsiveness, faster new product development, reduction in overall supply chain costs and catering to a larger global marketplace is through adoption of

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agile manufacturing processes, supply chain integration and collaborative design and development. The Move To Agile Manufacturing Organization, Processes And Systems: Agile manufacturing encompasses organizational structure, processes and systems that enable delivery of higher manufacturing flexibility across larger product variety, production volumes, delivery lead-times and product quality. These are manifested in several forms: - Localized clusters of excellence (e.g. Taiwan in the semiconductor industry, China in apparel/ footwear manufacturing) have emerged based on manufacturing cost economics. - Concepts of late customization and postponement are facilitating companies into having end-market assembly/ treatment facilities. - Rapid adoption of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. - Massive Manufacturing Facilities that are vertically integrated and run on economies of scale are giving way smaller and nimbler manufacturing facilities. Supply Chain Integration And The Development Of The Extended Enterprise A collaborative and integrated effort in product development, engineering and manufacturing with the other supply chain entities is essential for the development of an efficient consumer response model. This response can be seen in the form of: - IT enabled optimization of the supply chain, resulting in significant benefits on costs, delivery and quality, e.g. automotive suppliers connect directly into the OEMs production system through VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory) to read on-hand inventory balances and determine the replenishment needs thereby reducing inventory, procurement and labor costs. - Advanced Fulfillment with a focus on ATP (Available To Promise) and CTP (Capable To Promise) systems calls for the development of an extended enterprise. - Performance management across the extended enterprise is essential for monitoring the health and vitality of the supply chain. Identification of the bottlenecks and their redressal is essential to increase the throughput to the customer. Innovation & New Product Development Through Collaborative Product Design And Engineering Collaboration in product design and development is helping crash the time to market. The move towards outsourcing has resulted in a need to bring multiple design and engineering entities from within and outside of the enterprise together. - Real time development and concurrent engineering becoming the key to cut down cycle times. Stage-gate models will increasingly be used to shorten the cycle time from Concept to Sell. IT applications will seek to enable and manage such data and process intensive efforts. - Product innovation will continue to be the growth driver for most manufacturing companies with a rapid increase in customer choice. - A robust knowledge management infrastructure is essential to foster innovations and quick turnarounds on developmental efforts.

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USHERING IN THE DIGITAL MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE Informational Adequacy complemented by Business Intelligence and Exception Management and supported by a robust Knowledge Management infrastructure is essential to support the requirements of agility and responsiveness. The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise envisages an integrated information model, one that spans across the entire enterprise regardless of size, geography or complexity. Our perspective of the application landscape in any manufacturing enterprise is that we can clearly see three tiers of applications. These are: 1. Enterprise Applications such as ERP, SCM, CRM, SRM, PDM and so on. 2. Plant level execution systems which address the needs of shop floor automation and address requirements like time attendant systems, quality management systems, WIP tracking systems, Job Scheduling applications, plant maintenance and so on. 3. Plant automation and controls that do the actual tracking and monitoring of various process parameters and equipment parameters.
The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise enables efficient exchange of information between multiple manufacturing applications through an integrated information model.

Agile Manufacturing

THE DIGITAL MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE

Integrated Information Model Enterprise Resource Planning Product Data Management Customer Relationship Management Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Integration

Manufacturing Execution Systems

Product Engineering

Greater Flexibility And Responsiveness Across Product Variety, Production Volumes, Customer Delivery And Product Quality

Collaborative Product Design/Engg.

Plant Automation And Controls

The major disconnect in IT application infrastructure in most manufacturing organizations today lies in the lack of tier-to-tier connectivity. Applications exist to support strategic, tactical and operational needs across these tiers. However, what is required is an information model that would integrate multiple tiers of applications such as plant automation systems, manufacturing execution systems and enterprise applications. In essence, the requirement is of the formation of a Digital Manufacturing Enterprise. This would be essential to drive planning and execution together such that any changes effected on one-side results in a timely communication to the other. Real time plant information management systems are data-event driven applications, which help analyze and manage cost- and time-critical information. The typical manufacturing organization today has myriad and specific applications running in a patchwork mode each addressing a specific function and having a certain owner. Data sharing and exchange is mostly through point-to-point interfacing between applications. Hence the comprehensive holistic picture doesnt fructify, as most of these are need based and done on an ad-hoc

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Illustrative Case Study 1

A leading auto manufacturer has a build-to-order strategy that has contributed to its increasing profitability over the years. The company has integrated its front-end systems with the plant level systems to achieve objectives such as Available To Promise (ATP), decreased time to market and the ability to incorporate change requests late into the order execution cycle through several key elements such as: 1. Order Change Control: Provide change flexibility till the order is put into the production cycle 2. Reactive Production Planning: Limited capacities in-house, utilization of contract vendors 3. Web based ordering at OEM dealerships: Order systems incorporating feasibility validations and ATP checks; Quick response time for any changes in order specifications and statuses. 4. Advanced Production Systems: Capability to do Late order assignment 5. Assembly Line Stability: Stable sequencing of jobs at the assembly lines to reduce production cycle variability.

manner. As an example, the production planning process is a complex one it takes inputs from the forecasting systems, the inventory systems, the employee maintenance systems, the plant maintenance systems, and so on. The digitization of the enterprise has to provide an application infrastructure that enables such data movements in a process driven manner and which supports scaling up of more applications through minimal interfacing needs.

A question that comes to mind is: Is the digital manufacturing enterprise limited to the organization alone? The agility metrics of nimbleness, extendibility and flexibility hold true not only for the company but also for its value chain partners for, more often than not, value chains compete with each other. As a consequence, - Supply chain partners have to integrate their core activities based on value deliveries to compete with other supply chains. - With increasing dependence on value chain partners and higher importance of leveraging a global organization, a significant emphasis has to be put on improving collaborative activities In essence, the digital manufacturing enterprise would have two levels of integration: - Intra Enterprise Within the organization, the integration has to be robust and has to enable bi-directional propagation of information between planning and execution. - Inter-Enterprise - With the supply chain partners, the integration needs to be in the form of defined touch-points for collaboration and information sharing.

Illustrative Case Study 2

A leading player in the optical networking product manufacturing space develops and manufactures parts and components for the telecommunications industry. The companys IT Applications Plan for the Products Group is based on the manufacturing requirement to scale production in very short time frames and deliver high volumes of reliable, cost effective products. The company views Information Systems as a strategic enabler and whose role in e-Business process automation will be critical to manage the demands of product innovation along with the ability to achieve quick scale up of production volumes. The IT Applications Plan for the customer envisages a close integration of the resident ERP system with various Manufacturing Execution Systems to enable the needs for managing the above need. The company views this as an important step to realizing accurate, real-time data and to improve the decision making process. The resulting decisions/actions are viewed to be drivers for improving customer service and decreasing cycle time for the end customer.

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Enterprise business processes will drive the IT requirements for both. The necessary characteristics for the IT application infrastructure will therefore be: 1. Ability to manage heterogeneity across applications. 2. Manage and configure workflows to support business processes. 3. Scalability across data volumes, data exchange frequency, data transformation capability, new application addition etc. 4. Ability to meet different data interaction types such as collaboration, review, approve, etc. CONCLUSIONS The digitization of the manufacturing enterprise would lead to the use of Information Technology in supporting all the essential functions of the manufacturing enterprise across the entire product life cycle from conceptualization to end after sales consumer service. These would include new product conceptualization, prototyping, manufacturing and the marketing the product. The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise would have many components all connected through an information network that would allow knowledge management to be leveraged across processes as diverse as product development and equipment maintenance. The same infrastructure would allow planning systems to talk in near real-time with execution systems with the result that feasibility checks and resource constraints would drive all production activity. The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise would enable companies to realize benefits in manifold ways. Some of these would be: 1. The creation of a knowledge management infrastructure that would facilitate learning, knowledge capital re-use and innovation management. 2. Internal and external business process automation through business process workflows. 3. Partner collaboration and informational exchange through EDI, extranets etc. to facilitate partner interactions across the supply chain. 4. Operational Excellence through a synchronization of planning and execution.

Authors Sandeep is a domain consultant in the Manufacturing And Supply Chain practice at Infosys Technologies Limited. Sandeep has over 8 years of consolidated experience in various manufacturing organizations in areas such as plant operations and maintenance as well as in providing IT consultancy services to manufacturing companies. Sandeep can be contacted at sandeep_kumar@infosys.com Joy Prakash is a Consultant in Infosys Technologies Ltd's Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management focus group of the Domain Competency Group. He has over 7 years of experience in the areas of Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management with leading steel company. He can be reached at joyprakash_somani@infosys.com

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