Welcome !
Posted by Wise Desi on October 9, 2008
Welcome to MOB, the Manufacturing Operations Blog! It’s now formally open. I hope you have a great time on this site, reading articles and posts that provide some real original insight into issues that you care about.
Manufacturers are living in an increasingly complex world. Supply chains are getting longer and more dynamic; production facilities are getting distributed more and more globally, ownership of manufacturing facilities getting distributed across multiple companies due to outsourcing and rise of contract manufacturing. All of these changes are distracting manufacturing from what they would love to do – run production at a very consistent and fast rate and produce a high quality product.
Agility has taken new meanings for manufacturing plants due to the investments made by corporate IT in SCM and ERP applications. Due to increased visibility into short-term demand, manufacturing managers are spending longer times in meetings with people in sales and demand management, continuously negotiating schedule changes and many times wholesale changes in production processes in a very short time frame to accommodate new products or new customer specifications.
The time for ramping up on new products, taking a first article out and refining the production process is shrinking and manufacturers have to now make adjustments after the production has already gone full scale.
Add to this list, the pressure from low cost regions in the world and increased scrutiny from regulatory compliance point of view, the world of a manufacturing manager looks increasingly unmanageable.
On the positive side, manufacturing is finally getting the attention from IT community and CFOs as an area that needs fresh investment. Companies are realizing that if there is an area that is hurting the most due to lack of visibility, it’s manufacturing. While manufacturing got the shorter end of the stick during ERP roll outs of 90s, they are getting the maximum attention during the Business Intelligence (BI) revolution of this decade.
If you go back a few decades back and look at the evolution of IT systems, in particular what we now know as enterprise software systems, you’ll realize that these systems had their roots in manufacturing industries and were designed to run manufacturing companies. When the first generation ERP companies such as SAP, BPICs, began, they had two primary functions – Finacials and MRP. It’s Somewhere along the way, the evolution of enterprise software took a detour and started focusing on other functions in a typical enterprise such as financial accounting, order management, procurement etc. In the race to automate these functions using a centrally integrated massive corporate wide enterprise system, in other words, during the transition from MRP to MRP-II and finally ERP, manufacturing got left behind. It’s only now that manufacturing is getting its due attention from IT.
It’s interesting to see that golden period for evolution of enterprise systems coincided with decline of manufacturing in North America, where most of software applications emerged from. 1990s, on one hand, witnessed enterprise software take a big leap from an MRP package to MRP-II and finally ERP and all other three-letter acronym cousins of it, manufacturing got off shored more and more from North America.
This blog is not about importance of manufacturing to the economy of North America or any particular country or society in general. If you are interested in that, go visit …wwww.nema.org. However, it does offer some clues on why manufacturing got left out and didn’t get the required attention from enterprise software vendors. We’ll examine some of the reasons on this blog.
For last 4 years, while working for Oracle Corporation, I have had the opportunity to interact with many of you- customers, partners and analysts and engage in discussions about various issues facing the industry. This is my attempt to broaden the horizon and formalize the approach.
I look forward to an active dialogue and discussion with you on all issues related to Manufacturing and Manufacturing Operations.
You can join the bandwagon as a a fellow blogger. For details, please visit the “Join MOB” page.
Thanks you for stopping by!
Amit K. Singh
