Golf club and golf ball manufacturer Callaway Golf Co., in Carlsbad, Calif., wanted to develop the flexibility to introduce seven to eight new products annually. This meant tight coordination between design teams, marketing and plant engineering. This also meant sharing information with partners in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Mexico. The teams needed to share large files of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software.

To ensure that programs could be exchanged effectively, the company adopted Teamcenter Community Collaboration, a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution from Siemens PLM Software, a Plano, Texas-based unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division. The content management tools in the PLM solution, combined with Microsoft SharePoint collaboration tools, let Callaway control changes made to product content by providing document and version histories and e-mail alerts.

Crucial integration

“We live or die by our CAD and CAM software, so the integration Siemens PLM provided was crucial,” says John Loo, senior manager of design systems at Callaway. “We have design teams in California and suppliers in Asia, but everyone is able to collaborate effectively by posting their product content on the portal and keeping track of what’s being done on specific projects.”

Loo’s collaboration solution encompasses a number of recent information technology (IT) trends that blend corporate IT and plant automation: collaboration, communication across global operations and increased flexibility in manufacturing. As manufacturers struggle to become more efficient and responsive to changes in the market, companies can no longer afford to allow the plant to operate in isolation.

The “war” between plant operations and corporate IT that broke out just a few years ago is over. Most of the recent trends in plant automation involve collaboration with corporate IT. The old barriers between the enterprise and the plant have blurred or collapsed completely, as manufacturers gain greater dexterity in customizing their products for a global market. “People are beginning to realize there can’t be a war any more between the plant and the enterprise,” says Alison Smith, research director at AMR Research Inc., in Boston. “The smart companies know this can’t be a war—instead, it’s about shared resources and shared services.”

At many global manufacturers, the IT group is getting involved in automation decisions. “IT organizations are now responsible for building global manufacturing,” says Drew Costakis, managing director for U.S. manufacturing at Microsoft Corp., the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. “We’ve moved from every plant picking its own technology to the enterprise choosing technology with one or two MES (manufacturing execution system) vendors.”

Even as IT trends offer business improvement opportunities to plants, those trends will have to be blended with legacy plant automation. “Most companies can’t rip and replace the plant information that has not changed in 20 years,” explains Steve Garbrecht, director of product marketing at Wonderware, a manufacturing software supplier in Lake Forest, Calif. “So plants will need to integrate what they already have with new developments in IT.”

Six trends

Here are six trends in IT that are having a direct impact on plant operations. First is security. While security was originally the domain of the IT group, many companies have taken security seriously enough to create a security group with a chief security officer. But even when security has its own mandate and a corporate leader, the implementation still typically comes from IT. “We find that security groups now fall outside IT or the CIO (chief information officer),” says David Kennedy, practice lead for profiling and e-discovery at SecureState, a security technology firm in Cleveland. “We find it now falls under a chief security officer even if IT is the implementer for the organization.”

Collaboration, another major trend, is becoming critical for global companies, and the collaboration is stretching beyond internal teams within one plant location. Collaboration is going across global plants and out to the supply chain. New tools in Microsoft Vista, the company’s latest personal computer (PC) operating system, allow people around the globe to share information simultaneously, so disruptions can be acted upon instantly. “There are silos of planning, accounting and manufacturing, and people need to collaborate across those boundaries,” says Microsoft’s Costakis. “All of this data—what is it screaming as us? When you see a fire, you don’t send an e-mail. We need to solve this with business intelligence and collaboration.”

The third trend—virtualization, or the technique of hiding the physical computing resource from the way other applications interact with it—allows plants to add new technology to existing technology without costly and disruptive integration projects. This is particularly ...