Electronic intelligence in manufacturing

Manufacturing Engineering, Sep 2001 by Waurzyniak, Patrick

Machine tools begin connecting to the Internet

In the first of our three-part series on e-manufacturing, we examine the promise the Internet offers to manufacturing engineers striving to improve manufacturing. Part One covers how advanced electronics and the Web can help manufacturers improve productivity by automating and streamlining their processes. Part Two details the Neb-based software applications, services, and online exchanges that make e-manufacturing and e-commerce tick. Our series concludes with Part Three spotlighting companies that are moving to install the manufacturing industry's e-factories of tomorrow.

Until lately, many machine tools remained mostly untouched by the Web. In spite of significant grains in CAD/CAM/CAE software, including deployments of virtual reality, simulation, and advanced NC packages, machine tools on the shop floor are sometimes still characterized as "islands of automation," disconnected from the rest of the manufacturing enterprise.

More and more signs point to that scenario changing, as machine tool manufacturers get serious about adding embedded intelligence and advanced electronics to enable their machine tools to connect to the corporate networks and the Internet to exchange invaluable manufacturing process data with others throughout the organization. To accomplish this objective, manufacturers today are looking at going beyond what traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES) offer. They're turning to sophisticated e-manufacturing systems that more fully use machines' embedded intelligence to funnel manufacturing data in real time over corporate networks and the Internet to management, manufacturing engineers, and shop-floor supervisors.

Defining e-manufacturing isn't that easy. "The 'e' has gotten overused, and consequently, a lot of manufacturers now equate e-manufacturing with e-business," notes Dick Slansky, senior analyst for ARC Advisory Group (Dedham. MA). "They don't really see how it applies to integrating all their factory systems together. We're really not using the term e-manufacturing that much anymore because it confuses so many people. When you integrate MES with enterprise systems like product lifecycle, supply chain, and customer relationship systems, it then becomes collaborative manufacturing."

A true collaborative manufacturing (CM) system moves well beyond the scope of electronic data interchange (EDI) and execution of production processes. As Slansky defines it, CM systems include the ability to execute product development, supplier, production, delivery, and customer cycles in real-time via the Intranet/Internet.

To cope with Internet-based build-to-order scenarios and increased outsourcing by industry, e-manufacturing systems use real-time data pushed up from the plant floor to enterprise-level applications, according to Slansky. A company like Tecnomatix Technologies Ltd. (Herzilya, Israel) embodies what he sees as a traditional or classic kind of MES or enterprise production management (EPM) provider that offers a suite of e-manufacturing applications that range from process planning systems to factory and assembly-line simulations. Enterprise application integration (EAI) providers will offer Web services and technologies like Extensible Markup Language (XML) to connect the manufacturing processes to the enterprise tier.

"What we have seen evolving is that the IT technologies have converged with the operations on the factory floor," Slansky adds. "It used to be that the only computing that happened on the factory floor was maybe an operator interface with a monitor that was hooked into some kind of an execution system at a higher level. You didn't see pervasive use of computing on the factory floor, except for NC machines, and they were pretty self-contained except for DNC systems. Today, the IT technology that fueled the information technologies, the office and the enterprise layers, have come to the factory floor."

Technologies like OPC (OLE, or Object Linking and Embedding, for Process Control), COM (Component Object Model), XML, and the Java programming language on the Web have made it much easier for manufacturing systems to connect with each other over the Internet, explains Slansky. "Now we have Web services based on J2EE and soon [Microsoft's] NET," he adds. "All of these technologies will enable collaboration. There was always this Holy Grail of manufacturing-to connect the system to the board room-but it was a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing because really, relatively little from the factory floor was delivered to enterprise systems in terms of data and information. It didn't really go anywhere, except for some low-level execution systems."

Spurring the move toward e-manufacturing systems, the decades-long outsourcing trend, continued industry consolidation, lean manufacturing systems, and greater supply-chain integration with the Web have all played huge roles in making any e-manufacturing system promising to solve manufacturing problems more attractive by using manufacturing data more efficiently than did earlier ERP-oriented systems. In particular, outsourcing huge portions of the business poses a supply-chain dilemma for many of the automotive and electronics manufacturers that have embraced the outsourcing business model.