Manufacturing 2.0 what is it?

If you have been watching AMR now Gartner for the past 3 years they introduced the concepts of “Manufacturing 2.0", which looked at where manufacturing and industrial architectures could go. Many of the concepts were not new, but they did a good job showing a whole picture and the components needed to make this architecture real. Too often you get a concept thrown forward but it is only part of what is required, and people miss the whole picture.

But this concept of Manufacturing 2.0 has been picked up by MESA in their push on educating the market, and they now run certification courses on the concept of Manufacturing 2.0. These courses are good for hybrid, discrete and process companies and system integrators, even if you have been doing MES for years you will learn techniques and concepts.

The diagram below shows two levels of Manufacturing 2.0, one from the enterprise level, where the manufacturing is fitting into a corporate SOA architecture. Down in the bottom right hand corner is “manufacturing”, now the second diagram drills into the next level, showing a real SOA architecture in industrial landscape.

Operational Control is it Real?

As you have heard over the last couple of months in this blog that we or I believe in that leading companies must start changing their thinking in operational system design to embedded best practices and enable consistent decisions in the NOW.

An example of this is seen below on a operational control project Invensys did in process industries:

The key thing provided to the operational people was KPIs in their operational context as seen in the screen up in the right hand side.

The spot chart shows operational points layered over each other. With the pink and blue showing operational control prior to implementing an “Operational Window” based  upon Dynamic Performance Measures which provide in the context of the worker/ role, aligning strategy, measure and action.

The yellow shows the same teams operations post the application of the “Operational Window” approach, you can see the significant reduction in variation and distribution of the operational control. To this client it has realized significant cost reductions, and it did not require hardware implementations or plant changes it was an initial step in the road to operational excellence by gaining operational consistency through awareness.

This is not the final step in is an initial step but a real one with only information in context role and business strategy,  to enable aligned decisions in the NOW.
It is time to discuss SOA architectures and Manufacturing 2.0 is it real and why, I have had many people ask and discuss with me situations these concepts will be critical so in the next couple of weeks we will expand down this path. 

Operational Windows Enable a Form a Operational Control

I have talked about the drive by many companies to reduce “Operational Variation” across plants, teams, and industries. This is a key part of "virtual situation room". As I continue to talk with different companies this theme continues to grow and come up, many companies do not understand or realize they implementing steps towards it but when you discuss the underlying goals it is true.

There are many ways that operational control will be implemented, as pointed out it could be through actions and processes becoming embedded and certainly this will be the big driver in the road to “Operational Excellence”.

But another way is through displaying key operational indicators to a knowledge worker, where  these indicators are mapped within boundary conditions. These boundaries are set up based on the time and relevance to the role and activity/ task the knowledge worker is performing. This sort of “Operating Window” enables the knowledge worker the context, and recommendations, knowledge to enable operational decisions in a timely and ever consistent way. This same operational window can be used over multiple sites/ and teams for that role and activity providing consistency control.

The figure below is an example of an operational window.

Virtual Expert Teams, Provide One answer to “Time to Performance”

We often hear of the aging workforce as a big problem, and certainly it is due to fact that it is not a evolutionary transition it is leap to a new generation, and in most cases due to market the realization of the true situation was not understood.

But what we seeing in the market is some innovative approaches to solving this existing experiencing and the transfer, and it is through the use of “Virtual Experts Teams”. So what is this concept?