Hello and welcome to my blog.
My first column focused on the subject that it is time for Plant and Corporate IT to grow up. The column focused on making the point that Plant and Corporate IT need to create a manufacturing application framework based on a single data model or schema across all systems to break down the organizational barriers to success for achieving adaptable manufacturing. I do not care how much Lean, TOC, TQM, TPM, Six Sigma, etc. work you do. Until your business processes, their transactions and data are based one language, data model and transaction set, your company will fail to create an adaptable manufacturing resource that is integrated into your globally distributed supply chain. Our biggest problem today is that if I ask 100 CIOs of the top manufacturing companies if they are planning to base their systems and their SOA approach on ISA-95, OAGIS, or ISA-88, none will know what I am talking about. And most important, none currently understand the business of a standards-based approach to mapping their plant and business processes into an SOA system framework for supply chain and manufacturing operation management. The CIO has no clue that his system architecture is not adaptable or that the largest cost of life cost of his systems is in supporting customer interfaces that are translating disparate data between systems in an inaccurate, untimely manner.
What do you think???
