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

In the first post of these series (HERE) I wrote that overall mission of CoE is:

• standardization
• capitalization
• continuous improvement

In this post we will focus a bit on standardization. What does it mean to standardize in global manufacturing? What can be standardized and what should be result of standardization.

I touched this topic a bit in a technical backbone post (HERE​​​​​​​) mentioning importance of global solution being hardware agnostic, due to fact that global manufacturers, are indeed global. This basically means plants are in different countries, geographies, with local suppliers of machines, with local labor rules etc. Yet the goal is to manufacture the same product everywhere we aim to produce that product. Since plants are built in various moments of time the full standardization of equipment and production lines is a costly and unachievable dream.

What can be standardized and in what manner?

Ways of working, which we map into Business Processes. So how we produce, same thing, potentially using a bit different equipment, but wanting to achieve same level of quality of end product.

There are also numerous processes that fall under the scope of MOM solution, which are not direct working on the product transformation, but without which is impossible to produce. I am speaking respectively on shopfloor logistics (bringing material and components to work on), quality control (testing, deviation handling) and equipment maintenance activities. All those can be standardized and share best practices on “how to do it efficiently” and be supported by MOM solution. E.g., shopfloor logistics – each plant may have slightly different structure for warehouse, different amount of locations, and different amount of space on shopfloor. However, does it mean that they cannot share same method of executing eKanban replenishment that will assure 100% material availability on shopfloor? Of course not.

Now...

How much we can standardize our ways of working?

This is difficult question to answer.

It is very individual case for every manufacturer, depending

• how similar plants and products are,
• how local regulations affect ways of working,
• do we have sets of plants with different maturity on equipment etc.?

All above and much more comes to play. Overall goal is typically to standardize as much as possible and leave some room for local flexibility and tweaks. Not only to accommodate for existing differences but also for continuous improvement from which we can capitalize later (I will try to talk about this in future posts).

When the standardization should start?

Here we touch very broad topic of CORE Model methodology, in overall best answer is, since very beginning. The solution should follow standardized business processes from the very first site, to make rollout more efficient and assure the larger percentage of common processes.

Of course, again this is a process itself, not every plant is doing everything, especially if we want to create CORE Model that will cover multiple modes of production, multiple products on multiple sites. Nevertheless, the starting point should be representative, not the hardest case, not the simplest one, representative.

In addition, as the rollouts will go CORE model should evolve, but the evolution does not mean only growth. It also means cleanup and further harmonization of processes, replacing obsolete or very similar ones with common approach.

The evolution of CORE Model will be topic of my subsequent posts, in the meantime please let me know what you think of above, what are your lessons learnt on this topic of standardization, and maybe this short post can trigger some experiences exchange in comments below between you dear customers.