Companies are crawling, walking, and running to reach the dream of the seamless, integrated industrial enterprise. Janie West, director of new business development at Wonderware, observes that "e-manufacturing can mean many things from e-Procurement, B2B, B2C, B2M, Industrial Ethernet, Portals, TCP/IP, UDP, XML, Collaborative manufacturing, wireless, embedded Web Servers, to Supply Chain management. Most companies are in the process of adopting or 'piloting' some pieces of the above as it makes sense in their particular plant or process." West believes that "most industries today have problems accessing data which can be real-time or transactional, in a variety of formats and sources and getting this information out quickly to everyone who needs access to it." (Click here for more.)

Adds Synergetic Micro Systems' Perry Sink: "Watching companies adopt new technology is like watching liquid chromatography separate the color components of black ink: over time, the distance grows further and the distinctions grow sharper. There are commodity industries like steel and lumber where a few customers are still using relays to solve logic, and there are high value industries like semiconductor where equipment builders diligently search for innovative methods and tools, and even Artificial Intelligence is not uncommon." (Click here for more.)

The reasons for this technological transition vary from industry to industry, according to Steve Smidler, vice president of global manufacturing solutions at Rockwell Automation. "For example, paper wants to drive out efficiencies that are causing them to fight a price per ton battle," Smidler explains, while the "automotive industry is getting into it to connect with their tier one suppliers. Some auto manufacturers want to use e-manufacturing to connect with their customers. They'd like to provide a two-week or even a two-day order-to-delivery timeframe." (Click here for more.)

Keith Winkeler, director of product management/measurement platforms at National Instruments, concurs that auto manufacturers are "ripe for e-manufacturing as consumers want more control over the procurement process." Still, the communications and consumer electronics industries and their push toward contract electronics manufacturing "are the primary drivers of e-manufacturing as the profit margin pressures continue to drive companies to leaner manufacturing operations," notes Winkeler. (Click here for more.)

"You will receive many definitions of e-manufacturing as it encompasses a very broad spectrum of applications," comments Peter Bolger, vice president of sales and marketing at e-Manufacturing Networks Inc. "Many efforts have focused on the application of ERP and pushing scheduling down to the shop floor. Information is viewed at the shop level and some manual input is received regarding scrap. Bar coding systems are generally used to track inventory and feed information into MRP systems as well." (Click here for more.)

Bolger tells IEN that manufacturers "are not getting the big returns on investment they originally hoped for. In fact the case is just the opposite in many situations. Most ERP systems are not agile enough to support collaborative e-manufacturing models that many manufacturers are implementing today. We have noticed a large push toward monitoring OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). Companies are trying to find hidden capacity in their assets, improve quality and overall throughput all at a lower cost. To do so, you must start with data. You can't improve something that you can't measure."

"Larger companies are adopting e-manufacturing ahead of the smaller sized enterprise," says Carol A. Ptak, global SMB solutions segment executive at IBM. "This is very similar to the adoption pattern of most technologies like ERP and SCM." E-manufacturing provides a single face to the customer by integrating a variety of back end manufacturing sites into a single holistic enterprise that is easier to do business with. "Some smaller companies are aggressively investing in e-manufacturing because they expect to obtain a competitive advantage," Ptak notes. "The tight linkages with their customer base allow them to develop a 'stickiness' with their customers and appear as an integrated part of their customer's business. Others are only adopting e-manufacturing when their customer who is typically much larger than they are force them into adopting this approach." (Click here for more.)

Sophistication and Integration

E-manufacturing faces two major challenges, according to Ptak. "From the technological side, the necessary integration tools required to integrate different ERP systems (or legacy systems) must provide highly reliable information and be available 24x7x365. In addition, the need for security has never been greater. Demands are increasing for operating systems and other technological infrastructure that cannot be hacked or be affected by viruses. From the business rules perspective, the decisions need to be made on what information is to be shared, with whom and how often," she notes, and successful manufacturers are "integrating these two operational approaches from the beginning."

"From a test perspective, e-manufacturing dramatically raises the level of sophistication that test software and instrument manufacturers must provide," Winkeler observes. "The promise of e-manufacturing is the integration of enterprise systems that simplify operations and improve efficiency," adds Winkeler. "A company's manufacturing test system is one critical piece of the integration puzzle." The importance of testing grows "as the reduced time-to-market and time-in-market drives companies toward higher performance test systems developed in a fraction of the time it took to develop yesterday's test systems."

Integration remains a key obstacle as well. "One of the biggest challenges is connecting the myriad devices and proprietary networks to permit the flow of data and allow companies to leverage e-manufacturing," says Vince Tullo, senior vice president, GE Fanuc Automation. Strategic vision is key: "If you are simply taking the same mechanical processes and digitizing, you may not be fully leveraging the potential of e-manufacturing. This is not about yesterday's manufacturing processes; it is about a vision for today, your future, and the future of your partners and suppliers," Tullo stresses. (Click here for more.)

Microsoft's Systems and Networking Research Group addresses "problems related to advanced and speculative systems and networks.Hardware platforms, software APIs, and communications protocols are evolving at a rate that requires frequent system upgrades.The dramatic increase in the amount and complexity of interconnected systems dictates that they be self-organizing; it is no longer feasible to require extensive human involvement to update or fine-tune hardware and software systems."

But perhaps the biggest issue is a human one, according to Sink -- the "thin technical staff of users. There's a lot of learning curve to absorb with a small number of people."

Users can look forward to "e-manufacturing anywhere," according to Ptak, where "information will be available through a series of inexpensive wireless devices so that the expense of purchasing desktop computers is avoided and the information is available any time and any where."

Winkeler believes that "the next one to three years will see breakthrough innovation in the integration of test software and test instruments into the e-manufacturing environment."

Some innovations are just around the corner. Nyles Priest, president and CEO of MachineMate Inc tells IEN that Kent Machinery "has dedicated four man-years of engineering effort to the development of e-machine software using the Internet and the MachineMate PC-based CNC control." By the end of 2001 this software is scheduled to include memory recording functions; real-time Internet/Intranet monitoring capability; remote upgrade functions; Manufacturing Information Systems; optimized part parameters; and an Internet Service Center "allowing customers to create and check CNC part programs," Priest adds. (Click here for more.)

e-Manufacturing Networks concentrates on the collection of data from CNC machines. "We manufacture our own embedded HW/SW solution, which turns any CNC into a node on the corporate network," Bolger explains. "On the one side we interface to the extremely closed CNC environment and on the other side we provide open, standard interfaces to the IT world using Ethernet, standard protocols and standard data tools such as OPC and XML."

With the expansion of open standards-based architecture, including Linux, Java, Apache Web Server and XML, Ptak adds, "competitive advantage will come from superior operating systems and middleware that improve overall security and reliability. For example, the IBM e-server iSeries has a state of the art operating system that to date has never been hacked and cannot be infected by a virus."

Software can also help hold down capital expenditure costs, Winkeler points out. "Industry standards such as the Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) reduce the growing software cost of instrument upgrade cycles by eliminating most of the software changes required," he says, while the "integration of IVI-compliant drivers with ADEs reduces the growing hardware cost by leveraging modular PC-based instrumentation."

According to Priest, today's PC-based CNCs "primarily use Windows NT for a stable software platform. Windows 2000 and Linux operating systems are on the drawing board for PC-based CNC manufacturers."

"Products are slowly being re-defined as communication devices, not just widgets," adds Sink. "In 2-3 years most industrial devices will have web servers. More and more PDA based tools are diagnosing and configuring factory equipment."

Meanwhile Microsoft continues to address challenges and problems related to B2B and application-to-application (A2A) integration with a "new approach to software design that enables the flow of information between applications regardless of platform, object technology, or development language," the company says. "This new approach is based entirely upon open standards, particularly the eXtensible Markup Language (XML)." (Click here for more.)

How do companies coordinate traditional operations with e-technologies? "Without a clear understanding of all elements involved in the information flow and decision-making process," warns Bryan Harris, director of business consulting serves at Atos Origin, "your new e-world will either lie to you in magnitudes faster or pass by critical points of information management. The most successful [companies] are taking a step back and establishing a clear understanding/mapping of their current and planned business processes and tools supporting them. Once this has been accomplished, and by the way many learn surprising things when doing this exercise, it is then possible to develop an 'eStrategy' that will accomplish as objective of defining roadmaps for process development, tool selection, integration requirements and change management that will enable not only systems, but the people who use them to understand their new roles and responsibilities within an 'e' business world." (Click here for more.)