IEN: What advances do you see in production management, collaborative manufacturing, plant intelligence and visibility?
Littleson: Global manufacturers face unprecedented pressures to avoid customer loss while improving profitability in an increasingly volatile and fast-paced environment. This environment is creating a "reality gap" between planning and execution as a result of constant changes in supply, demand, capacity, and products. Advances in Response Management are allowing manufacturers to "manage at the moment" and gain a competitive advantage.
Constant changes in supply, demand, capacity, and products are difficult to manage, impossible to predict, and can trigger a steady erosion of margins and market share. But with an effective Response Management solution, manufacturers can quickly make informed, best-practice decisions and manage these situations as they occur. In order to do this, a Response Management solution needs to deliver the following capabilities:
Alerting and Event Management: Stakeholders and suppliers need to receive proactive alerts and updates to the existing plan and be able to schedule regular and contingency monitoring of supply and demand conditions. Notifications should be sent by email, web page, flat file, and other mediums and you should be able to exchange updates and information with internal and external databases, business intelligence software, and other systems through standards-based APIs including COM, SOAP, and XML. Facilities should exist to automate responses and use alerts to trigger additional contingency processes.
Enterprisewide Visibility: Organizations should be able to view, share, and manipulate data across multiple disparate systems and locations from a standard browser, including the ability to drill down through embedded hyperlinks to access greater detail. Organizations should be able to tailor the interface for the views and detail you want and share information access and privileges by user or group for staff and suppliers.
What-If Analysis: Employees need to be empowered to respond quickly and to simulate, share, and review options with colleagues and suppliers while incorporating changes from multiple stakeholders into comprehensive simulations. Simulations should be based on current MRP and MPS data. To ensure consistency, organizations need to be able to record and publish best practices for specific situations.
Continuous Analytics: To be responsive, employees must be able to see change outcomes in seconds as analytics automatically recalculate results and be able to identify the full impact of decisions prior to execution based on custom metrics and calculations. This requires the ability to manipulate current data in seconds instead of hours and to manage supply and demand across multiple internal and external sites.
Scorecarding: Critical to making the right decisions is the ability to rank and align decisions with goals in real-time using a live scorecard. Such a scorecard should enable you to measure parameters such as customer impact, costs, and quality to rank and compare action alternatives while ensuring alignment with strategic objectives. Users should be able to adjust criteria weighting to reflect unique requirements and customize scoring for departmental, divisional, corporate, and user-defined targets. And critical to problem solving is the ability to drill down through result figures to establish their root causes.
Today, manufacturers face demands for last-minute flexibility from their customers along with an increasingly complex global supply chain. Poor visibility into production and labor issues compound these problems and often lead to expensive inventory policies. The difficulty of merging all these variables into a single cohesive response often prevents managers from seeing the full impact of decisions before they are made. But with an effective Response Management solution, manufacturers can quickly make informed, best-practice decisions and manage these situations as they happen.
