MES: Will E-commerce Drive It Into Auto?

Automotive Manufacturing & Production,  Jan, 2000  by Lawrence S. Gould

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MES--manufacturing execution system--is not a common term in automotive manufacturing, but the concept is gaining credibility as the industry responds to supply chain and E-commerce pressures.

General Motors and Ford, even AlliedSignal, have always dealt with a hypothetical composite customer--a "statistical model of someone who may never really exist," asserts Raymond Lipa, COO for BRL & Co. (Ann Arbor, MI).

Now there's a revolutionary change afoot. The automakers and their suppliers want to "touch the buyer and ripple buyer information back to corporate," continues Lipa. And eventually to the assembly line.

In short, one-on-one marketing is taking hold of the automotive industry.

Both customer relationship management (CRM) and advanced planning and scheduling (APS) make one-on-one responsiveness possible. Theyhelp companies move from a forecast-driven world to a more pull-based one. But when that happens, there are fewer speculative builds, more build- and assemble-to-order environments, and volatility goes up, warns Lipa. "Today's plants can't handle that."

More to the point, current manufacturing execution systems (MES) can't handle that. MES needs to have "bi-directional, real-time linkages" to the enterprise system, along with the GEM and APS systems. Lipa says that for the first time ever, plants and their executions systems must be a relevant part of the automakers' business strategies. In fact, corporate strategy for e-business demands it.

Ironically, those plants with complete flow lines that churn out a particular product day in and day out have, according to William Swanton, vice president of Manufacturing Strategies at AMR Research (Boston, MA), "leaned themselves out so much that they don't need MES."

But now they do. This vague thing called MES is now a critical data source. So change is afoot in MES, as well.

Standard, But Configurable

"MES describes an area of work," says John Woods, director of Manufacturing Floor Systems for General Motors (Detroit, MI), "a space generally critical to the operation of the plant." That space, consisting of an integrated collection of applications, is between controls and enterprise systems. Swanton defines MES simply as the system that knows what the order is, knows something about that order, and can electronically communicate that information to people and machines.

Whatever MES is, the OEMs don't have it as commercially available products. Whatever they have, they've developed. For instance, the basic material broadcast and sequence implemented throughout GM worldwide is a highly customized system developed by GM. Granted, development and implementation came with outside assistance from a systems integrator, such as EDS, but that assistance was performed to a specification or project definition, often on a per plant basis.

Nowadays, pieces of MES are showing up as packaged applications, though "we don't see any vendors targeting 'run an automotive assembly plant' as a product," muses Woods. As a result, the OEMs (and Tier 1 suppliers for that matter) are "trying to redefine their automated systems along these commercially available modules," says Clif Triplett, GM's Global Production Process Information Officer. For example, GM is trying to "break manufacturing execution down to maybe 10 or fewer key modules with more clearly defined interfaces," says Woods, rather than keep and maintain the "hundreds and thousands of integration points" that currently exist in the assembly line systems. Applying the 80/20 Rule, retrofit and new-plant implementations will be much faster with these modules, and the automaker's customizations will be minimized.

Frankly, OEMs and suppliers are probably not looking for MES, per se. Instead, they are looking for "off-the-shelf, configurable solutions to particular problems they want to address. That may be a subset of a fully integrated MES," says Marty McGraph, vice president of Marketing for Real World Technology (Mt. Prospect, IL). Configurable is key, because the plants' "uniqueness is something they can't break out of box," adds McGraph.

On the other hand, the OEM and Tier 1 suppliers are eschewing uniqueness. By running their plants the same way, they can measure the plants against each other, apply the best practices learned in one plant across the entire enterprise, and swap out parts of the plant. Easily installed, easily configurable off-the-shelf MES packages would help here, and substantially reduce implementation time and cost.

AccEssing StatE Information

What OEMs and suppliers are looking for is the current state of a customer order in the build process, right down to the current status of a given device in manufacturing. Ideally, MES would communicate state information about individual production equipment and the results of that equipment's execution cycle--against a multitude of subassemblies that constitute a customer order.