One thing everyone knows is that manufacturing today is not what it was twenty-five years ago. Heck, it’s not even what it was five years ago. Given the massive changes that have impacted and are continuing to impact the manufacturing industry, how do you know if your method of operation is good enough to sustain your business?
To help manufacturers assess their operations, MESA has released a new white paper titled: “Applying Global MOM Systems in a Manufacturing 2.0 Approach”. In this paper, MESA answers such question as: What is the global best practice for manufacturing operations management (MOM) systems and IT architecture? What practices do industry experts recommend for different manufacturing types and supply networks? Is your management thinking and corporate culture outdated for the changing global market? Is MOM technology too expensive and your IT architecture unable to rapidly adapt to market change?
MESA says the primary reason behind the development of this white paper is that too many manufacturing companies are reluctant to adopt new thinking for operations work processes, especially where intelligent systems are making task-level decisions based on operations rules and real-time inputs. Though plant equipment tends to evolve on a continual basis, MESA notes that work processes supporting intelligent equipment remain based on paper transactions to execute production orders.
As a result, the use of intelligence technology has evolved rapidly among the few companies that have adapted their operations to it, leaving most manufacturers behind. This paper explores the four main perceptions and obstacles that the above-mentioned "best in class" progressive companies had to overcome to gain enterprise-wide acceptance of their MOM systems architecture as a corporate strategy. Those four perceptions/obstacles are:
• Why MOM and not MES (manufacturing execution systems)?
• Why use service-oriented architectures in manufacturing?
• Why use master data management (MDM) for manufacturing?
• Is enterprise manufacturing intelligence best positioned against or with business intelligence?
For each of these concepts, what they mean and where they fit are explored to expose manufacturing technologists and end users to the concepts and the benefits of accepting and working toward this vision. The paper concludes by evaluating the different integration approaches used over the years and comparing them to the current proposed best practice.
