In order to improve your manufacturing performance, you should put in a manufacturing execution system (MES) system and integrate to your enterprise resource planning (ERP)—right?

 Organizations that have adopted a Lean Manufacturing methodology continue to identify elements of their organizations that have diminished in terms of their strategic value.

  The automation services market is the fastest growing segment of the automation business. ARC Advisory Group’s recently published study, “Automation Supplier Provided Services,” shows that the total services market served by the automation suppliers approached $14 billion in 2006, and will grow at an average annual rate of more than 12 percent through 2011.

  In manufacturing, as in other industries, human resources must be effectively deployed for optimal utilization and effectiveness in order to drive accelerated growth and profitability.

 The critical component of this process is the access, aggregation and analysis of data emanating from the production process.

 “Computing technology has advanced to the point where we can deploy virtual equipment to simulate the production process and generate control code.”

 Interest in Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) has grown considerably in recent years. The demand for higher return on assets, the need to drive plants beyond normal production levels, the desire to lengthen plant lifecycles and the availability of new CBM technology have all contributed to this growth.

 Some people think things never change, while others fail to see the antecedents of today’s events. We’re probing deeply into manufacturing software in this issue and some may think that this is totally new thinking made possible only by the latest software technology.

 Cutting costs has become an obsession in the automotive and aerospace sectors, driven by intense competition, shorter product lifecycles and elements of a commodity business.

 Once built into the hardware costs, automation services are now becoming a separate revenue source for automation suppliers, in the face of declining hardware margins.

 Trends come and trends go, but being lean is always in fashion. And so it is with Lean Manufacturing, which, in its most classic definition, is the elimination of waste and all non-value added activities from the manufacturing process.

 Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has proved valuable as a means to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of product development.

 What do you know?

 Today’s manufacturer faces a daunting world of ruthless, global competition, overcapacity, depressed economies and increased product commoditization.

 The concurrent engineering required for new product designs between design engineering and manufacturing engineering has always been a critical focal point for manufacturers to shorten time-to-market, accelerate time-to-volume and minimize cost of production.

 Manufacturers across virtually all industries have significantly cut information technology (IT) spending. They have also begun rationalizing the numerous applications that have been installed over the years, and have begun migrating from best-of-breed applications to solution suite providers such as IFS (www.ifsworld.com), SAP (www.sap.com), Oracle (www.oracle.com), PeopleSoft (www.peoplesoft.com) and SSA (www.ssagt.com).

 Microsoft has taken great pains to clarify what .Net really means and how it will be critical to transforming its enterprise strategy.