GlobalManufacturingSuite ​​​​​​​COE ​​​​​​​

In the previous post I started outlining what are success factors in Global MOM Deployment (and in further enhancements and scope management).

The first one was – technical capabilities of the solution, which can natively support the concept. In this post, let us highlight some key aspects of this topic and decompose it to main pillars.

• Standardized connectivity and being hardware agnostic
• Focus on supporting business processes and ways of working not purely on equipment
• Capability to share best practices and perform remote configuration changes

Why those three?

In multisite environment, we typically talk about number of plants in different locations. This often mean different local equipment suppliers and maintenance. The plants are also not build and equipped at the same time, hence the equipment to do same tasks in various plants might be different (newer revisions, completely different supplier etc.). Therefore, the first bullet point is extremely important.

Local adaptation of every global model will be always needed; the more standardized the connectivity that assures the abstraction layer between business logic and hardware, the better. Same goes for integration with other business systems. We can go into details of those topics in further posts.

Now,

why focus on business processes than on equipment?

Partially because of above, equipment in multisite environment will be different. It will be performing the same tasks (operations or steps in business processes) and providing same expected outcome, but the way it does it and what parameters it exposes may be different. What matters? Primary concern for any manufacturer – is a product – in global context it is typically to be SAME product as produced elsewhere, with same quality and characteristics as produced elsewhere (global brand integrity etc.). Here comes into play the necessity for the proper solution to primarily focus on product and way to produce the product rather than on equipment and its characteristics.

The last bullet point was about

sharing best practices and remotely managing your multisite.

This capability start to be crucial from the very second factory you will enable with MOM solution. Already from second rollout, you might start getting improvements that you would like to include for your first site, and you do not want to redo the project, or spend a LOT of time transferring those improvements.

Here, I wanted just to emphasize on the last bullet from the initial paragraph.

It is crucial that multisite solution allows:

• transferring configuration from one site to another without need of traveling,
• getting back local modification to central development environment for capitalization / improvements
• having overview of current versions of business processes active on each site

There are of course number of other aspects that we can discuss related to this capability and we will touch it in numerous further posts.

Please let me in comments which ones you would like to explore more so I can incorporate them in future episodes.