It has often been said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In this case, the whole is a manufacturing enterprise and the parts are its various divisions and departments ranging from accounting to manufacturing. Today, the drive is to unify companies by integrating their wealth-creating processes (the shop floor) with their wealth counting processes (the top floor).
Of course, why companies would want to fragment themselves in the first place is anyone's guess unless they felt they needed more challenges and a sustainable way of eroding profits. But things are changing. When asked, most businesses agree that they will benefit from the integration of their business and production processes. When asked where they have identified opportunities, however, few can answer but it must be a good idea since mainstream players like SAP (with its NetWeaver offering) and Wonderware (with its ArchestrA industrial automation framework) have started promoting the value of the concept and their collaboration in making it a reality.
Clearly, integration for integration's sake is going to lead nowhere. The reason behind shop-floor to top-floor integration is to focus the company's resources in order to achieve its objective. In other words, integration initiatives should be driven by the requirements of the business rather than technology, opinions or dictates. The benefits of a unified rather than fragmented enterprise are substantial:
* For the first time, the left hand will know what the right hand is doing. The links between the shop-floor and the top-floor are strengthened to provide right-time decision support at all levels of the enterprise. Management and staff can take decisions based on present-time factual reality rather than month-end reports.
* Accurate performance measurement at all levels (people who perform like to be measured).
* Total harmony between sales, production planning, maintenance and manufacturing.
* Optimised use of human and technological resources.
* Delivery of objective data eliminates disputes and allows personnel to focus on the issues at hand.
* Purchase decisions (eg, for new plant, automation initiatives, etc) can be based on whether the purchase will conform to operational requirements and help the company achieve its objective rather than on emotion, opinion, technology or relationships. In this way, purchase decisions are more easily justified and their effectiveness can be measured.
* Improved regulatory compliance.
* Greater wealth creation.
The challenge in achieving all this lies not with technology but in getting the IT and C&I (control and instrumentation) personnel to work together on achieving common objectives for business benefit where knowledge is shared between both camps. In most businesses, these are organisationally different bodies with no common direct management.
Today, instrumentation engineers have become the IT managers of the shop-floor in charge of vast repositories of mission-critical information. But because they work in a different time domain and have requirements different to those of traditional IT does not mean that their functions are all that different. In fact, there are probably more similarities than differences between IT and C&I. Of course, this brings up another problem as to who should be the responsible custodian of the company's information assets. One idea that is working well in practice is that they both report to the same leader who aligns their contributions to the needs of the business and coordinates the activities for each group.
Another challenge is how to migrate the legacy automation systems of the past to a homogeneous technology platform such as ArchestrA. Knowing that this would be the first question asked by prospective users, the designers of ArchestrA have made the job as painless as possible as more than 30 installations in South Africa will testify. Although technology is no longer the stumbling block in integrating the shop-floor with the top-floor, there are issues to bear in mind including:
* Sustainability of the solution - integration needs to be driven from the top but needs the support and buy-in of everyone it will affect if it is to be sustainable. Logic and common sense will usually prevail and be more popular than the alternative.
* Flexibility - the ability to change and to support the evolving business while safeguarding existing investments and without affecting existing systems.
* Cost of ownership - integration should cost less than fragmentation because it pools together and improves the effective use of the company's assets.
* Availability of support resources - practical integration is relatively new so there may not be too many people one can look to for help - and that is probably a good thing because no one knows how to run your business better than you.
Integration has evolved through business necessity and was not imposed on the industry like so many three-letter acronyms. That is why it will work. It is not necessary to do it all at once and it is in fact far better to do it in incremental, measurable steps that conform to the company's business requirements. But integration is coming and the growing popularity of concepts such as service-oriented architecture is testimony to this.
Have you ever wondered at the efficacy of a one-man show? He sells what he makes and invoices the sale without any conflict of interest whatsoever. There is no reason why a thousand-man show should not be that well integrated.
For more information contact Justin Tweedie, Futuristix, 011 0861 WONDER, justint@futuristix.co.za
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