Designing "Network-centric" Manufacturing Systems

Designing "Network-centric" Manufacturing Systems – New Challenge to Industrial Engineers

Manufacturing is undergoing a major transformation. Companies are migrating away from the traditional manufacturing environment to one in which they act as designers and systems integrators, with the actual manufacturing being done by smaller companies. This creates a distributed, network-oriented virtual corporation of sorts.
This scenario is already common in the defense industry, where much of the production is done by smaller firms in the supply chain. A prime contractor such as Boeing may farm out to small companies more than 80 percent of the work on some systems. This dramatic change in the way companies are approaching design and manufacturing has given way to collaborative design and contract manufacturing processes known collectively as network-centric manufacturing.

The new paradigm

"Network-centric" provides useful shorthand for describing a broad class of approaches that arise from the networking of the entities that constitute a modern manufacturing supply chain. Network-centric operations give companies access to a previously unreachable region of the information domain, which provides a new type of competitive advantage.

Demands on IEs

Evolution represents both opportunity and challenge. As developments in information technology change the way we design and manufacture products, most other dimensions of manufacturing--products, markets, and processes--are becoming more complex, diverse, and international. The products manufactured by even the smallest firms have become more sophisticated, and demands on quality have increased due to the acceptance of philosophies such as Six Sigma and total quality management. Using these quality systems allows companies to achieve goals widely regarded as critical to the future of manufacturing. However, new capabilities do not come without a price. They have placed new demands on industrial engineers and system designers who must work in much more sophisticated manufacturing environments. Relationships among members of the supply chain have also become more complex.
A key issue for industrial engineers has emerged from the research by TIDE (Technology Insertion Demonstration and Evaluation program): For many manufacturers, particularly small firms, business processes are a function of the software they use. Consequently, the processes of most manufacturers are a function of commercial, off-the-shelf software. For example, design processes are largely determined by the computer-aided design and product data management system employed by a company. Similarly, much of how a firm manages its production resources is shaped by its enterprise resource planning, manufacturing execution system, and scheduling software.

New, more effective methods for designing, and installing complex manufacturing alliances are now mandatory skills for industrial engineers and managing them for business managers. Furthermore, in many cases a small manufacturing entity may be the producer of a mission-critical component. The supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The research identified the need for process engineering tools and related personal skills. Chief among these is the need to model and simulate the manufacturing environments of even the smallest firms in a supply chain. The risks of implementing new technologies and processes, while high for large manufacturers, are devastating and often fatal for smaller firms. The ability to determine the consequences of proposed changes is a must in this new network-centric environment.
Fortunately, there are many powerful and reasonably easy-to-use general purpose modeling and simulation packages suitable for smaller manufacturers.


TIDE found smaller suppliers tend to lack the capabilities needed to respond to their customers' (larger companies) demands for affordability, quality improvements, or speed of response. A lack of capital, a lack of technical resources, or both may be the root of that problem. The issue has become problematic in recent years because most weapons and munitions system manufacturing is done by suppliers.
Recently, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Boeing Corp. successfully implemented a program to improve the capabilities of the suppliers of an important product and coordinate their activities. Most components are manufactured by a group of small (less than 200-employee) manufacturing enterprises. The components are then shipped to Boeing's facility in Missouri, where final assembly is accomplished. The program has produced dramatic results for the six small manufacturing enterprises involved: The average productivity increase was 25 percent, and cycle times decreased by 60 percent. The cost per unit, quality, and on-time delivery levels remained stable as production volume doubled.

The manufacturing technologies implemented as part of this program are representative of the network-centric manufacturing paradigm that transforms small companies in the supply chain and synchronizes them to the virtual corporation to ensure manufacturing goals are met.

Barriers to success

There are a number of barriers facing small and medium-sized enterprises in their efforts to achieve the capability required to participate in sophisticated, fully collaborative supply chains. Three of those barriers are particularly problematic:
* What's good for the supply chain may not be good for the individual firm. Each company in the network-centric manufacturing environment provides a technology or process capability not available as efficiently from any of the other companies. The system designer's emphasis shifts from optimization of the individual company to the network.

Without careful coordination, individual companies can lose control of their in-house processes, leading to a variety of problems such as schedule delays, too much inventory, and material shortages. Operating practices in individual companies may not generalize well to the supply chain, making it difficult for a company to operate effectively in the virtual enterprise. Many times this makes owners and managers of individual firms reluctant to commit fully to the needs of the larger enterprise.

* Systems cannot interoperate. Because each member company in a network-centric manufacturing environment has its own set of software tools and IT practices, there is a good chance that these companies use different hardware and software platforms. It is likely that data produced by the application systems of one company cannot easily be read by the application systems of another. Efficient, error-free exchange of data is a must if the network is to operate effectively.

* Unfamiliar technologies and application systems. The companies in a network-centric manufacturing environment must cooperate and share technologies and application systems. These technologies and application systems are often complex and require extensive training to be used correctly. Many smaller firms do not have the necessary industrial engineering, information technology skills, or human assets. Developing this expertise can be a time-consuming and expensive undertaking and may be out of the reach of a small firm.

Conclusion

Combining manufacturing philosophies such as Six Sigma and lean with powerful software packages opens the door for significant improvements in manufacturing and allows a fully collaborative supply chain. The question is no longer if network-centric manufacturing makes sense, but how best to achieve it.
To accelerate progress toward a network-centric capability requires that we move beyond the limited nature and scope of the applications explored to date.
Network-centric manufacturing is based on:

* Collaboration among firms that make up the virtual enterprise that is the supply chain, including a vision of the capabilities required in the future state.
* Establishing appropriate metrics and measures.
* Developing assessment tools to evaluate the readiness of individual firms as well as the information network used to link them.
* Simulation of an actual supply chain and demonstration of key network-centric performance attributes.
Introduction of new software tools and the rapid expansion of high-performance computer networks such as the Internet enable manufacturers to come together electronically to exploit new opportunities, dramatically improve their processes, and produce innovative products. These new capabilities would not be economically or technically feasible for the companies to achieve individually. But the electronic sharing of production and design knowledge--true supply chain collaboration between the companies--can overcome single-firm limitations and result in a virtual corporation that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The challenge for industrial engineers is to develop the tools and methodologies required in this network-centric manufacturing environment. TIDE and other development efforts are creating the tools and techniques needed. Industrial engineers and manufacturing systems designers now have the opportunity and the challenge to embrace these new tools.

There are several critical roles for modeling and simulation in a network-centric atmosphere. Since the basic premise of network-centric manufacturing assumes combinations of autonomous or semi-autonomous entities, simulation of the virtual enterprise's performance is a key element of risk mitigation. It is imperative that simulation standards for models and data can accelerate the modeling process and reduce modeling costs, making it something that smaller firms participating in key Department of Defense supply chains can accomplish.
A prerequisite for performing a thorough examination of the operations of a manufacturing environment is developing a model of the shop. The model is a description of the manufacturing-related entities and activities in the shop. The model should allow the user to specify characteristics of the manufacturing entities, relationships between the entities, and the production activities that manipulate the entities. It should support descriptions of the shop from different viewpoints to ensure there is a place to specify information important to the shop floor manager, the machine operator, and the maintenance engineer. And it should be possible to specify different parts of the model at different levels of rigor and to increase the thoroughness of model parts as new insights into the shop's operations are gained.
The TIDE team created a fairly comprehensive shop data model and exchange file format for data-driven simulation. It separates simulation functionality into modules in a new way. The shop data model encompasses a significant portion of the data required to run a real machine shop, not just simulate its operation, Links are provided in the data format to reference data maintained in files that use other standards. This approach, based on a unified data format, ensures data consistency between the real shop and the simulated shop--removing the need to abstract or simplify real shop data to create a simulation--resulting in the elimination of a major step that is usually required in the simulation modeling process.
Charles H. Buhman Jr. is the director of the Technology Insertion Demonstration and Evaluation program. He is a member of the Advanced Manufacturing Enterprise sub-panel of the Joint Defense Manufacturing Technology Panel.

About TIDE
TIDE was created with a grant obtained by Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania. Originally based at Carnegie Mellon University, the program is now conducted by the Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technologies. Although its specific focus is helping small manufacturers that supply goods and services to the national defense, the program's work can be applied to all small businesses.

For more information about TIDE, visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tide/index.html.

The article is a summary of

"Oncoming wave of collaboration: the TIDE program is showing small firms how to jump into manufacturing networks."
By Buhman, Charles H., Jr.
Publication: Industrial Engineer
Date: Friday, August 1 2003

Charles H. Buhman Jr. is the director of the Technology Insertion Demonstration and Evaluation program. He is a member of the Advanced Manufacturing Enterprise sub-panel of the Joint Defense Manufacturing Technology Panel.



http://www.allbusiness.com/specialty-businesses/742639-1.html