Managing Automation - February 2009 - (Page 24) DEEPDIVE collaboration strategy ma poll ule for a line has changed — and make adjustments on the floor to run the next part based on the scheduling change. And if a downstream customer changes a shipment impacting the production schedule, people on the plant floor can adjust on the fly. This type of mashup application brings new meaning to the word “integration.” “In the past, discussions around integration and collaboration have focused on technical details,” Pierson says. “But now, with SOA, the teams can have conversations about information, FORMAL COLLABORATION STRATEGIES LAG MOUNTING and who is producing and conBUSINESS PRESSURES suming it, so that we can be more productive.” Q: Is your company looking at new methods of collaboration between departments and geographies in an effort to be more efficient and productive? No: 16.3% Yes: 76.7% WRESTLING WITH ROI Allowing people to be more productive in the field is another high priority for manufacturers trying to streamline operations and keep track of valuable assets, such as a fleet of trucks or even people. Internet-based technologies can help here, too. Air Liquide, for example, makes and delivers oxygen cylinders to hospitals and doctors. The company has plants in California, Houston, Chicago, and Florida, with a back-office team in Houston dispatching orders. Until last year, drivers responsible for delivering cylinders mapped out their own routes and managed their own time. To offset such inefficiency, Air Liquide used a Xora Inc. GPS tracking system to download an application onto drivers’ cell phones that acts as a tracking device and enables dispatchers to locate trucks. The system even finds the best route available, based on such conditions as traffic or road construction, and delivers a map directly to a driver’s cell phone. The Xora application also ser ves as a time clock. Using the interface on the cell phone, the driver can click “start shift” or “stop shift,” or download a list of customers and orders. The information is fed into an Don’t know: 7.0% Q: Is your company looking at ways to collaborate outside of the company, with partners and customers? Yes: 65.1% No: 23.3% Don’t know: 11.6% Q: If your company is pursuing collaboration initiatives, how would you characterize its strategy? A formal business strategy with the backing of top management (with a goal of creating a unified enterprise): 29.7% An informal initiative without clear goals and objectives: 24.3% A strategy that individual departments are pursuing to create cross-functional teams: 21.6% Don’t know: 13.5% A strategy that individual business units are pursuing: 10.8% Percentages may have been rounded and may not equal 100%. Oracle ERP system, which serves as a collaborative tool for plant managers, dispatchers, and drivers. “It’s all Web-based. You just need a user name and password, and, wherever you are, you have access,” says Air Liquide North American Operations Director Matthieu Giard. Just two months after deploying the Xora application, shipment volumes rose almost 12% while total costs increased only 3%. “It means we offset price increases [related to] salary, inflation, and fuel, and absorbed the additional volumes at no extra cost,” Giard says. Unlike Air Liquide, most Web 2.0 technology users can’t assign hard ROI numbers to the new collaborative ways their companies work. Some say the ROI of collaborative technology, especially if it is in the form of blogs, wikis, and IM, has to be measured in other ways. “Building enterprise value is about building institutional knowledge,” Equipois’ Golden says. The new generation of workers is ushering in new business practices that center on the value of intellectual property. With this change, the concept of “design to manufacturability” is evolving into “design to service.” That means closing the loop connecting design, production, and aftermarket service. “With the economic conditions as they are, companies need to excel at service by designing new products with things like warranty in mind, which is based on what the field service community thinks of the design,” Manufacturing Insights’ Friedman says. The basic idea is to reuse information and feed it back into the product lifecycle loop, he says. Web 2.0 technology can propel this concept forward. Just look at the Department of Defense’s Techipedia project, an internal version of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. Of course, you need Pentagon clearance to access this wiki, but the basic premise is to create an easy way for scientists, project managers, technology experts, and defense contractors to collaborate online using timely, relevant information. If the DoD can do it, why can’t manufacturers? “The tools exist, but the use cases are yet to be propagated,” Friedman says, noting that the DoD project could be one to emulate. For now, however, for companies, such as General Mills, which uses wikis, blogs, IM, and even an internal Facebook to help its 30,000 employees get acquainted, it is all about the speed of doing business. “In the old days, if someone couldn’t come up with an answer until tomorrow, it was OK,” General Mills’ Wetzel says. “But now, people say, ‘Get a hold of Joe because I’m trying to make a decision.’ Waiting for information is unacceptable.” ■ ma February 24 2009
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