(www.pelionsystems.com), a supplier of Manufacturing Process Optimization (MPO) software aimed at supply chain synchronization. “Real-time, event-driven capability is on the minds of IT professionals because their supply chain and factory managers and their customers are demanding that.”
Steve Duket agrees. But as senior product manager for supply chain solutions with Infor Global Solutions (www.infor. com), another software supplier based in Alpharetta, Ga., Duket believes that an additional challenge lies in linking external applications with other external applications, and standardizing data so that everyone up and down the supply chain understands what’s being said. “We want to move the state of the implementation, which is now somewhat localized, to a broader communication throughout the supply chain,” Duket says. Because today’s industrial environment is mostly one-level-at-a-time serial communications, what’s needed is broadcast communications, he believes. That means simultaneously communicating one change at any point in the supply chain, when the change occurs, to all nodes in the chain, he notes.
Linking external applications with each other, by having dissimilar systems communicate simultaneously, and standardizing the data are key to IT departments providing collaboration, Duket says. Collaboration means giving information to a company’s internal and external suppliers—and that means getting all functional departments in the enterprise, as well as the company’s trading partners, to work together better, Gleditsch explains.
“External supply chain collaboration requires a more sophisticated IT infrastructure, because you’re talking to disparate systems. The hard part is standardization of data. In automation, electronic data interchange (EDI) is doing the standardization,” Duket adds. Also helping now with data standardization is the use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), he says.
A collaboration tool Gleditsch mentions is a Web dashboard that goes down to the source of information. It must have the right algorithm to show what’s occurring and to build capabilities across the supply chain, he adds. Even common technologies such as e-mail and Web portals are tools for integrating with simpler trading partners, such as fab shops with only a couple of personal computers, says Justin Griep, Pelion Systems’ chief architect and vice president of development.
Besides facilitating collaboration throughout the supply chain, IT departments need technology that also can provide visibility and synchronization, Duket and Gleditsch both note.
Visibility is providing information to decision makers, Duket explains. “Tools could include dashboards, Web portals, Web services and scorecards.” To him, a customer-relationship-management-focused dashboard is most important, especially to operations-level staff and managers, because it can give instantaneous information on daily happenings. “I don’t want to spend my time looking at the past. If I’m going to invest my money, I’m going to invest in tools that help me meet today’s orders and make sure that none are late,” he declares. That real-time visibility gives information showing today’s happenings in the factory—information that managers and purchasers can use to act on a problem, adds Griep.
Synchronization is simply facilitating the implementation of a chain of demand-pull relationships, Gleditsch says, so when a customer pulls on one end of the chain, it synchronizes and translates demand all the way through the supply chain.
C. Kenna Amos, [email protected], is an Automation World contributing editor.
