Manufacturing Executive - September 2008 - (Page 26)

SPECIAL REPORT “ERP vendors have been guilty of what I call ‘marginalisation marketing’ — in other words, marginalising the MES level because they say their ERP can do everything a customer needs,” says Karl Schneebauer, MESA Europe vice chairman. Schneebauer, who is also partner manager at German MES vendor MPDV, says that SAP’s recent acquisition of MES vendor Visiprise demonstrates the importance of MES to ERP. “In the past, MES was a function of production activities,” says MESA Europe’s Snoeij. “Now, it includes the supply chain and the complete manufacturing enterprise.” Again, enter the guidebooks and the strategic corporate initiatives. The supply chain, for instance, can benefit from MESA’s “real-time enterprise” initiative, Snoeij says. By knowing exactly when a certain machine is down or when another has finished its task, and by feeding that MES information into enterprise systems, top executives can then make well-informed decisions on things like buying, selling, and forecasting. “If I’m a manufacturer and I’ve made a schedule, I expect certain parts in this afternoon at five o’clock. I can find out from MES if they are not coming, and make changes accordingly,” Snoeij says. Or as Cambridge, England-based analyst Simon Bragg of ARC says, “Manufacturers have begun to realize that if they want supply chain benefits, they need the visibility of what each plant is doing.” In an example from the lean initiative, MES “MES was a function of production activities. Now, it includes the supply chain and the complete manufacturing enterprise.”— Jan Snoeij will relay key findings between lean projects across a company to help lean scale, says Ganesh Wadawadigi, senior director of operational excellence suite solution management for SAP Labs, who heads MESA’s lean group. Pierfancesco Manenti, a Milan-based analyst with IDC Manufacturing Insights, offers an even more fundamental area of focus that should help drive sales of MES software. “Manufacturers in the last 10 years have forgotten the importance of manufacturing,” he says. In Manenti’s opinion, the emphasis over the last decade-plus on offshoring, logistics, the supply chain, and low-cost production has taken manufacturers’ attention away from au- MESA’s Strategic Model Aims to Identify Operational Value nlocking the business value of plant floor assets to help transform modern manufacturing enterprises has been a Holy Grail for the MES community for many years. Eighteen months ago, the international MESA group developed a new model designed to help senior manufacturing executives understand how to drive more value from plant operations. The model was created to identify practical and systematic flows that U 26 September 2008 Chart and photo courtesy: MESA International can deliver valuable operational information from plant floor automation systems up into the business to support executive-level operations improvement and corporate compliance strategies. The strategic initiatives so far identified by MESA in the new model cover five critical improvement areas for today’s manufacturing management: lean manufacturing, quality and regulatory compliance, product lifecycle management, real-time management, and asset performance management. The model represents three key levels in an organization — from plant floor operations, through business management, up to strategic corporate manufacturing initiatives. It covers the capture and flow of information at the most basic, value-adding production process and operational levels of the plant. It then tracks how that operational information can support and be supported by enterprise business processes and five longer-term strategic initiatives. This approach is not just a change of perspective for the international advocacy group; it’s also a sign of growing MES market maturity. “Historically, MESA has focused only on low-level software functionality requirements and technical operational issues,” says Karl Schneebauer, MESA Europe vice chairman and partner manager at MES vendor MPDV in Mosbach, Germany. “But this did not show executives the real tangible benefits for the business.” MESA’s new model is intended to bridge this executive knowledge gap. “We see these as crucial initiatives for manufacturing management that will help get them more involved in improvement strategies — connecting the top down with the bottom up,” Schneebauer says. “The relentless focus on improvement in the manufacturing sector makes this management need more urgent now than ever.” – Paul Tate

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Manufacturing Executive - September 2008

Manufacturing Executive - September 2008 Contents Editor's Letter Opinion By David Humphrey Starters Road Trip Part 1: Innovation or Efficiency? Part 2: The Innovation Gap Opinion By Lisa Bodell Special Report: Great Aspirations Supply Chain: The New Money Machine Product Design: Fruehauf Gets into High Gear with 3D CAD Business Intelligence: Food Distributor Turns Up the Heat on Manufacturers Software: Manufacturers Face SaaS Hurdles Dialogue Opinion By Pierfrancesco Manenti

Manufacturing Executive - September 2008

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