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Automotive Industry

Integrating the manufacturing enterprise: enterprise resource planning vendors have been very, very busy with acquisitions, new modules, and integrations. Here's a snapshot of some new developments

Automotive Design & Production, Jan, 2007 by Lawrence S. Gould

Integrating production control and ERP

Two powerhouses have teamed up to link the shop floor to ERP. GE Fanuc Automation, Inc. (Charlottesville, VA; www.gefanuc.com/en/Industries/Automotive/index.html) has teamed up with SAP (Newtown Square, PA; www.sap.com) to jointly market GE Fanuc's Production Management and SAP's ERP systems. These two companies have integrated their respective systems to ensure the seamless bidirectional flow of production information, such as production schedules, quality performance, inventory consumption, and maintenance status. Goodbye sneakernet, paper pushing, and other manual workarounds. Goodbye time consuming coding efforts to integrate an event-driven control system with a transaction-oriented resource planning system.

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A number of technologies operate behind the scenes here. For starters, a while back, SAP acquired Lighthammer Software Development Corp., which gave SAP a portal-based interface to access, view, and otherwise analyze the data sources (production equipment and controllers) on the plant floor, while reducing the complexity of building custom connections. (This is now SAP's XMII product). GE Fanuc released Proficy Enterprise Connector in April '06, one of the modules in its Proficy Plant Applications suite, a manufacturing execution system (MES). The Proficy connector provides bidirectional integration between Proficy applications and ERP systems. The glue between these two is Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML), an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based approach for exchanging information-rich messages (as opposed to just data) between business applications.

Proficy Enterprise Connector comes with a number of B2MML-based templates to jumpstart the integration process. The GE Fanuc/SAP joint venture has configured those templates for the two companies' systems. What's interesting about this, explains John Leppiaho, GE Fanuc's product manager for production management software, is that "using database transactions to exchange plant production and enterprise resource information makes it a lot easier for people to define the interactions between ERP and MES. This obviously is going to lower the total cost of ownership for organizations. But the tools that are being used and the capabilities of using things, like XML, to exchange this data, give users the opportunity to exchange additional information."

For instance, explains John Dyck, director of production management software for GE Fanuc, ERP generates a production schedule or a broadcast that tells how much to produce by when. ERP's assumptions are usually off, plant floor realities being what they are, but that's where MES fits in. MES is monitoring all resources, utilizations, consumptions, and so on, as well as the completion of end-items. When work orders (WO) are completed, MES signals ERP to initiate real-time inventory replenishment or backflushing. That same machine utilization data collected by MES can be the trigger for SAP to issue maintenance WOs based on the more effective maintenance strategy of usage and time, instead of assumptions and predictions. "Without a holistic production management system in the plant to collect the data, contextualize it, and drive the appropriate systems, processes, and people, you're running on three cylinders. You're not going to be as effective as you could be," says Dyck.

Focusing on planning and execution

"Over 50% of ERP implementations never get down to the planning and execution level," claims Charlie Eggerding, vice president of the automotive group at QAD Inc. (Grand Rapids, MI; www.qad.com). And yet, he continues, today's planning and execution is quite different than ERP algorithms of yesteryear, particularly those bought during Y2K upgrades. One major difference is the planning cycle. ERP generally manages in 24-hour buckets, but today's automotive industry constantly changes its demand and communicates that demand through the supply chain in terms of hours and minutes. That demand then gets communicated down to production, which operates in terms of minutes and seconds. Spreadsheet planning just doesn't cut it in such production environments.

From work with Johnson Controls, QAD introduced a just-in-time sequencing (JIT/S) module in June '06. This module manages sequenced production. (It does not, however, control inventory levels. That's the job of manufacturing resource planning, MRP.) The module can plug into QAD's MFG/PRO or any other ERP system. ERP tells JIT/S such data as items, bills of material (BOM), customers, and internal and external forecasts and production schedules. JIT/S balances these data with real-time customer requirements, on-hand balances, and production plans, and then returns sequenced production and shipment schedules, and backflush information.

Another QAD module, again developed with Johnson Controls and scheduled to be available in early 2007, is the Manufacturing Executing Workbench (MEW). MEW "works with the clock, not the calendar," says Eggerding. "In effect, and this is a bad term to use, we're doing 'on-demand' MRP." Bad or not, that's a fairly accurate description of the module. MEW is a continuously running, event-driven, real-time, on-line planning engine with full pegging. Any change (inventory, BOM, orders, shipments, etc.) immediately triggers planning to determine the effect of that change. The module schedules to forecast, production plan, or JIT schedule. Planning is done in hours and minutes rather than days (that is, bucketless planning using less-than-daily increments).

Automotive Industry

Integrating the manufacturing enterprise: enterprise resource planning vendors have been very, very busy with acquisitions, new modules, and integrations. Here's a snapshot of some new developments

Automotive Design & Production, Jan, 2007 by Lawrence S. Gould

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