Intelligent Manufacturing € January € 1995 € Vol. 1 € No. 1

Technology's Impact on Manufacturing

By William H. VerDuin

Manufacturing technologies have evolved when two conditions are met: (1) a new technology enables an improvement and (2) this improvement addresses a perceived need. Improvements in design technology assist the manufacturer but are often invisible to the customer. In contrast, advances in manufacturing technology are often of great interest to customers because they result in products with better function, higher precision, more features, or lower cost. This customer pull has driven a steady succession of new technologies.

Computers have become a key manufacturing technology and many manufacturers employ computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) at some level. Most manufacturers use computer-based manufacturing planning and management tools. Many use computers to monitor or control individual processes. The most progressive manufacturers employ computers to monitor and control every process and link processes and activities throughout the organization with a hierarchical data acquisition and control network spanning the factory floor and the organization as a whole.

These plant-wide systems provide a critical information management capability. Operators and managers can track results and spot problems on the basis of data that is useful in their area but generated in another. The good news is that more information is available. The bad news is that the volume of data can be overwhelming.

Computers took on a new role in manu-facturing management with the introduction in 1965 of material require-ment planning (MRP) systems. These systems generate a material requirements list in response to given pro-duction requirements. In this way, inventory management, purchasing and shipping activities are linked to manufacturing. In 1979, MRP II (manufacturing resource planning) systems were introduced. These systems take the next step - identifying the facilities and equipment as well as the raw materials required to meet given production requirements. This additional information supports scheduling and capacity planning by production planners who must determine how to meet processing and delivery requirements with available facilities.

An emerging market is developing for products that expand the scope of manufacturing support systems to encompass the entire organization. A term such as MRP III would not convey the broader scope of these systems, and so new buzzwords are used to describe these new products. Among them are enterprise resource planning, customer-oriented manu-facturing management systems, and manufacturing execution systems. By integrating data and soft-ware tools from marketing, manufacturing, sales, finance and distribution, these systems strive to move beyond optimizing production alone to optimizing the organization's many (and some-times conflicting) requirements of low cost, rapid delivery, high quality and customer satisfaction.

The many computer-based tools and databases now available across plant-wide networks need to be better integrated. Better methods to inter-pret and present information are also required. These goals will be achieved with new database and knowledge-based technologies.

Looking at the bigger picture, some say that the future will be the Age of Information and that effective use of information will be the critical element of future success. The acquisition and interpretation of knowledge in an organization-wide scale will become an issue of strategic importance, and the capabilities of knowledge-based systems will provide a strategic opportunity. Technologies and management approaches will focus on the acquisition and use of information from internal and external sources. The advanced computer-based information management technologies called knowledge-based systems share a common goal: better acquisition and application of knowledge. These systems will play an increasing role, interpreting data, solving problems and identifying successful responses.

Next month we will look more closely at knowledge-based systems for manufacturing.

William VerDuin (216-421-2380) is general manager of AI Ware (Cleveland, Ohio). This article was excerpted from VerDuin's book, Better Products Faster: A Practical Guide to Knowledge-Based Systems for Manufacturers (Burr Ridge, Ill.: Irwin Professional Publishing), 272 pages, $40.