Pursuing Manufacturing Excellence through Real-time Performance Management and Continuous Improvement
Executive Summary
Manufacturers are feeling new pressure on their operations coming from many directions. Dynamic market needs, increased compliance requirements, more distributed manufacturing operations, rapid product innovation, Lean manufacturing, and the approaching transition to new IT technology all manifest themselves on the plant floor and throughout the enterprise - and often lead to pleas for new technology solutions. Integration and data utilization are the two key issues to address in order to improve responsiveness and performance.
Many manufacturing companies recognize that improving corporate performance demands better synchronization with the plant floor. For too long, manufacturing has been isolated. Most of the important production data has not been easily accessible, and is therefore not very useful in improving performance. Today, however, feasible solutions are available to drive excellence in manufacturing performance through better manufacturing intelligence and integration.
Real-time Performance Management (RPM) solutions acquire manufacturing data in real-time, establish the operating context for that data, and ensure that it is stored in a manner that makes it accessible at later times for a variety of uses.
RPM facilitates the visibility of this real-time manufacturing data to users throughout the enterprise, and includes tools for enhanced decision support and role-based display of performance against operating metrics. Event-based triggers notify all who should be informed when important or unforeseen events take place. These solutions help companies achieve a higher level of manufacturing excellence by allowing them to better leverage their detailed manufacturing information.
In many companies, it falls to IT to envision new business possibilities in concert with the technologies needed to realize them. At the same time, the usual job of reducing the cost of doing business through increased efficiency and productivity cannot be ignored. This paper outlines how modern solutions can support both strategies at the same time.
Summary
Manufacturers recognize that they need IT solutions designed to improve performance in order to respond to dynamic market pressures, to become more flexible and adaptive, and to enhance competitive positioning.
Realtime Performance Management (RPM) solutions acquire manufacturing data in real-time and synchronize the plant floor with increasingly dynamic business operations. These solutions drive excellence in manufacturing performance through better manufacturing intelligence and integration.
They provide enterprise-wide visibility of manufacturing data, including key operating data, compliance information originating in the plant, and capacity and cost data. These systems are relatively light touch and minimal risk, because they leverage existing systems and do not require expensive rip-andreplace or replicate strategies. They are also relatively quick to deploy, so value is rapidly generated. Despite this, they can have a powerful impact in two ways: by contributing to reductions in the cost of doing business and increased productivity and efficiency, and by enabling new business processes or opportunities.
Because RPM is an approach that spans all categories of metrics such as Assets, Quality, Manufacturing, and Cost, a single solution can deliver performance benefits in all of these areas. When the measurement data for these metrics is linked to a continuous improvement program such as Six Sigma, the improvement cycle is accelerated and entire operations can rapidly move to higher levels of performance.
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