Some corporate managers see manufacturing as a black box with little value for the company. In a Wall Street Journal piece on June 12, retired auto executive Bob Lutz maintains, “A car company, on the other hand, is one enormous, hugely complicated organism that has many moving parts, all closely interrelated and interdependent.

 

“Many of the company’s activities are day-to-day: running the plants to produce components and assemble cars, procuring supplier parts, moving the finished vehicles to the dealers, billing same and booking the revenue. The operations portion of the automobile business has been thoroughly optimized over many decades, doesn’t vary much from one automobile company to another, and can be managed with a focus on repetitive process. It is the ‘hard’ part of the car business and requires little in the way of creativity, vision or imagination. Almost all car companies do this very well, and there is little or no competitive advantage to be gained by ‘trying even harder’ in procurement, manufacturing or wholesale.”

 

Most, if not all, manufacturing executives would cringe at these remarks. And many people in the United States would argue that the auto companies have done a great job of managing their manufacturing. Companies not only can gain competitive advantage from manufacturing, they can lose competitive advantage in a heartbeat through shoddy manufacturing—just ask Toyota.

 

A software application often called “track and trace” has been used to maintain a database of product lot numbers and destinations in order to reduce the scope of a potential product recall. Much like other technologies developed for industry for one purpose only to find its true meaning in another, track and trace applications have found more utility in closing the product quality loop within the manufacturing system. The goal now is reduced scrap, fewer bad products and improved customer satisfaction with the product.

 

Michael Lyle, chief executive officer of Software as a Service (SaaS) supplier InfinityQS ( www.infinityqs.com ) in Chantilly, Va., goes so far as to call the track and trace application strategic. “Typically, ProFicient on Demand is implemented as part of a strategic initiative to control quality within a single facility, global enterprise, and/or supply chain. The product contains many technologies to simplify data collection. Real-time visibility of supplier quality data allows manufacturers to collaborate with suppliers and ensure product quality before the product is shipped. By preventing supplier quality issues, business save time and money, and can prevent supplier related recalls. Data can be entered from mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablet computers. The ability to collect data in such a fashion allows for complete traceability of components across the supply chain.”

>> Read this application story on how a major nutraceutical manufacturer addressed labeling errors.

 

Phoenix Contact ( www.phoenixcontact.com) is not only an automation supplier, but is a manufacturer as well. Chris McLean, Ph.D., group leader for global electronics (hardware & firmware) development, discusses the company’s printed circuit board manufacturing. “We have processes in our own products, from raw materials to the end product. The goal is to take products in the field and when a customer calls with a serial number, we can trace all the way through the system—when tested, where, how, what raw material, particular batch of components traced to lot number. So, if one of our suppliers would call and say ‘we have a risk,’ we could take that into our system and figure out which products were produced and find the final product.”

 

So-called “infant mortality” in electronics manufacturing is a term for the situation when a product fails upon power up. Dr. McLean notes that another value of traceability in manufacturing is for customers who need to be 100 percent certain on products—such as products that will be used on an offshore oil rig. “For those customers, we go to a higher level,” he says. “We take the product through considerably more testing than normal—extreme hot/cold, full range, and not just burn-in, but a combination of burn-in and also electrical performance verification at temperatures. We can certify to the customer that they won’t have to go back to repair.”

 

While these applications provide an obvious marketing benefit to Phoenix Contact, McLean says, “Feedback from the process is good. Anything that would be a fall-out, say fails a stress test, goes through a process of learning and understanding why it failed. That is fed back into the system for process refinement. Over time, much better information gets into the ...