Looking forward to connecting with broader manufacturing community at APICS 2009, Oct 4-6.

We’ll have a demo pod for Oracle MOC and some speaking slots so looks like an exciting event.

http://www.apics.org/education/conference/schedule/

My schedule – arriving on Sunday evening, leaving on Tuesday night.

Oracle is hosting a dinner for select customers on Monday evening. I’ll be joining rest of my colleagues and many customers at dinner. Details here

Please join us for a webcast on Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center.

Date and Time: Thursday July 16, 9 am, Pacific Time

Please enroll using the following link

https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=146477531

Conference Key is “advisor”, all lower case.

Title:   Introducing Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center in Release 12.1.
Abstract:
In the current economic environment, manufacturing customers are focused on cost cutting and are increasingly looking for ways to get better returns from their manufacturing assets. This one hour session will introduce customers to Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center (MOC), an ideal solution for the current environment. Customers will learn how Oracle MOC has been designed to deliver value in a very short period of time- weeks instead of years.  Customers will hear about the unique standards based data model and other key capabilities of the solution.

We’ll cover topics including:

• How Manufacturing IT can provide real-time information on plant operations to their users
• How customers bring together bits and pieces of manufacturing data from different sources in a single unified data repository
• How customers can integrate shop floor systems and equipment with their back end ERP system including EBS Release 11.5.10
• How customers can get value in a very short period of time while implementing a solution that is architected for long term

Here’s a recent podcast that tells you more about Oracle Mfg Operations Center and mentions the blog

Oracle’s 2nd Annual Manufacturing Summit at Pella

Be part of Oracle’s performance Driven Manufacturing and plan to, attend the 2nd Annual Oracle Manufacturing Summit at Pella. If you have experience applying application solution to manufacturing operations you should not miss this event!

Spring Events Calendar

Free Event - Oracle’s Applications Unlimited Experts Live! Virtual Show - Wednesday March 11, 2009.
This action packed day kicks off in high gear with a compelling keynote from Ed Abbo, Oracle’s Senior Vice President of Applications Development. The remainder of the day is packed with live sessions as well as live chats with Oracle applications experts.

Free Event -Oracle’s Second Annual Manufacturing Summit at Pella – April 27-28
It’s Manufacturing Week in Pella Iowa!

Be part of Oracle’s performance Driven Manufacturing and plan to, attend the 2nd Annual Oracle Manufacturing Summit at Pella. If you have experience applying application solution to manufacturing operations you should not miss this event!

Learn from leading companies, who have experience applying application solutions to their manufacturing operations, as they share effective practices, process improvement initiatives and lessons learned. Oracle Strategists will provide insight into the direction and tools they are delivering to support customer’s reliability initiatives.

Then stay the week for Oracle Customer Showcase Pella Corporation – Lean Manufacturing - April 27 – 30
During the event, Pella will showcase how applying Oracle’s solutions is contributing to success for today, tomorrow and beyond. Functional groups will provide insight into their experiences with flow manufacturing, sales, service and support, warehouse management, financials, intelligence, expenses, and technology hardware, infrastructure upgrades and support and much, much more.

Registration Fee Event - OAUG Collaborate 09 Technology & Applications Forum (http://oaug.collaborate09.com/ - May 3-7,2009 Orlando Florida -
Access to 1,000+ User-Led Sessions
Packed with Best Practices and Case Studies
19 Educational Tracks
8 Deep Dive Workshops
Peer-to-Peer Interaction
Dozens of Networking Events,
Geographic and Special Interest Group Meetings
150+ Cutting Edge Exhibitors
Unparalleled Training Value

A trio of reports out Thursday pointed to gloom at U.S. factories:

•Manufacturing production fell 2.6% in September, the biggest monthly decline since May 1980, when the USA was in recession, the Federal Reserve said.

Read the full news item here.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-10-16-manufacturing-slows_N.htm

Charlie is an industry guru and a pillar driving the standards movement in Manufacturing Operations. Many of you may know Charlie from his work on ISA-95, with MESA international and must have read his book Hitchhikers Guide to Manufacturing Operations Management: ISA-95 Best Practices Book 1.0. Here’s a brief bio of Charlie.

For the past 25 years, Charlie Gifford, a Lean Production Management Consultant, has developed advanced manufacturing systems in a wide variety of industries: aerospace, electronics, automotive, food & beverage, telecom, energy, and life sciences. He is a nationally recognized expert in combining Lean Manufacturing practices with Production Management Systems. His background includes hands-on design, design supervision and team leadership in Production Transformation.

As an industry leader in professional organizations such as ISA, Supply Chain Council and MESA International, Charlie has contributed to and taught many manufacturing operations standards, such as ISA-88, ISA-95, Next Gen MESA and SCOR models.

Charlie has published over 35 papers on the subject of production management best practices. Most recently as Chairman of the ISA-95 Best Practices Working Group, Charlie was the Chief Editor and Contributing Author for the book, Hitchhikers Guide to Manufacturing Operations Management: ISA-95 Best Practices Book 1.0. Charlie was awarded the 2007 MESA International Outstanding Contributor Award.

Charlie’s latest endeavor is IICI, a new Industry Interoperability Compliance Initiative, being set up to oversee compliance to standards such as ISA-95. You can read more about IICI at Charlie’s blog here.

Welcome on board Charlie and look forward to hearing from you about IICI and other pressing issues.

As we know for far too long, manufacturing systems have focused on a bottom up approach to information management. Traditionally, manufacturing systems asked data to be entered into a system promising that information will come out at the other end. The paradigm was very promising. After all, the data is going into a data base where it is integrated with data being entered by people from other functions. Once the data is all in, how hard it is to get the information out of it. But as well learned through last decade or so, not so easy! Data in does automatically mean information out! Customers ended up spending tons of money and endless project cycles to build reports that didn’t always delivered what the end users were asking for and weren’t timely.

Things have changed a bit with the arrival of data warehousing and business intelligence systems. This time the focus was delivering the information to users in the format they needed it. But it didn’t quite benefit the manufacturing user. Most data warehousing efforts were focused on financial and customer management data. Why is that?

Not because manufacturing was considered any less important. The need for accurate and timely information about product and process quality, manufacturing operations and status and performance of manufacturing assets is very well understood and realized by most people in manufacturing industries.

The first reason was related to data. When it came to building business intelligence solutions, manufacturing data was missing in action. It wasn’t there in one place or two or three for that matter. It wasn’t stored in nicely structured relational data base systems. It was all over the place- in databases, in files and Excel spreadsheets, in embedded software, in hardware and on paper. How do you build a business intelligence solution for such an environment?

The second reason was related to timeliness of information. Unlike in Financials and sales related data where trends over time give you insight to make adjustments for the future, Manufacturing is different. Manufacturing environments are much more dynamic and require adjustments to exceptions occurring in real time. Information that is not available to run the production staff meeting every shift is too late. The world of data warehousing and business intelligence didn’t quite understand this need for real-time information availability in a manufacturing environment. That’s why I agree with AMR Research to call it out differently for Manufacturing Call it Operational Intelligence or Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence, it’s different. Once we accept that, things become a bit easy to understand.

Going back to my argument in my previous post, Operational Intelligence has a direct link to return on investment (ROI), more so than other business intelligence projects. That’s because Operational Intelligence can help support continuous improvement (CI) programs such as Lean and Six-Sigma those have long proven to deliver effective ROI.

If done right, Operational Intelligence can provide insight into Manufacturing Operations and help run the CI programs. If you believe in Kaizen, it can tell you where to focus for your next Kaizen. If you believe in Lean and waste reduction, it can tell you where the waste is occurring and what kind of waste it is. If you believe in Theory of constraints, OI can tell you where the next bottleneck is. Any CI program that focuses on improvement in operational efficiency can tell you where those opportunities are.

It’s a long list of promises but it can be done.

In the next post, I’ll address the question of ‘How’ to deliver on the promise of Operational Intelligence.