The Right Time to Perfect Your Plant - Patrick Crampton-Thomas and Simon Pollard, SAP

In a world where information is power, SAP’s drive for the perfect plant is linking shop floors with enterprises to improve profits and growth. Patrick Crampton-Thomas and Simon Pollard tell Nigel Ash why now is the time to put this on the executive agenda.

Manufacturing operations systems are the final frontier in the effort to reach a total business system. Corporations have already integrated finance and control, human resources, procurement and customer relationship management, but it is only recently that they have turned their attention to the shop floor.

Simon Pollard, SAP’s VP of discrete Mfg, EMEA, says, "As manufacturing has been distributed, the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MESs) to run it have varied between plants within a single business. Companies urgently need to integrate their manufacturing operations with the broader enterprise."

In addition, MESs only meet part of a manufacturer’s needs. Patrick Crampton-Thomas, SAP’s director of supply chain management, explains, "The result is a complex legacy of many systems with a high cost of ownership. And still, these systems do not offer full capability. They use batch-based integration, which hides critical management information and prevents timely response."

SOLUTIONS FOR PLANT INTELLIGENCE AND INTEGRATION

SAP has launched an initiative to offer a simplified, lower cost manufacturing solutions landscape with end-to-end capabilities and real-time management information.

Pollard says, "Since we began focusing on this area two years ago, SAP solutions for plant intelligence and integration have been embraced by leading production companies, including PepsiCo, Rexham, Pratt & Whitney and Whirlpool."

Crampton-Thomas adds, "Examples of customer benefits include increases of up to 21% in asset effectiveness, 8% in first-pass quality and up to 5% in waste and energy cost reduction."

STANDARD OFF-THE-SHELF REAL-TIME INTEGRATION

Shop floor operations vary considerably by industry, as Pollard explains: "Quality control in food production requires enormous amounts of real-time information that needs to be used proactively to pre-empt quality issues. In asset-intensive factories, real-time machine monitoring, diagnostics and intelligent preventative, maintenance is required to ensure maximum uptime and in discrete industries, ‘how-made’ visibility, right down to component serial numbers, is essential for effective engineering-change management."

Crampton-Thomas explains how SAP solves such issues, "We provide standard off-the-shelf real-time integration with around 150 of the most widely used shop floor systems. This allows fast deployment and low cost of ownership. We also use industry-specific partners, such as Visiprise for discrete manufacturing and Invensys Wonderware for process. They use SAP’s manufacturing and intelligence solution to link ERP to MES and provide enhanced user visualisation and analytics in key workflows."

CONSOLIDATING STANDARD SYSTEMS FOR THE PERFECT PLANT

Achieving the perfect plant requires high levels of adaptability to meet customer needs. This in turn requires the real-time manufacturing operations environment, where transaction times and data cycles are measured in seconds and minutes, to be closely linked to enterprise systems that manage global operations.

Pollard explains, "This cannot be achieved with the disparate and legacy shop floor systems prevalent today. Companies need to apply the same strategic approach they applied to their ERP IT landscape. Consolidating to standard systems across plants with streamlined and enhanced integration based on latest service based technology."

"There are fast ROIs available here – we are talking about project times measured in weeks and months, not months and years," says Pollard.

As manufacturing becomes increasingly distributed, globalised and outsourced, the need to provide better visibility into shop floor operations, with real-time information on quality, assets, costs and activities, will become more important. And those companies that achieve better integrated plants will be the leaders of their market segments in the future, as they win competitive advantage and adapt to changing market conditions more rapidly.