March 1997, Volume 14, No. 3 News In Brief

Ford is migrating its plants from a variety of maintenance tracking applications to the Maximo functionality in its FTPM suite as part of an effort to "commonize" work practices across Ford and further the company's savings by providing maintenance information.

To allow anywhere, anytime access to production and maintenance-related information, Ford is placing a number of touch screen-based PCs throughout its plants to make it easier for plant personnel to request maintenance work or check on the status of former requests. For example, a drill press operator on the factory floor can walk to a nearby machine, touch the screen, and request repairs to his or her machine. The interface links with Maximo to process, track and schedule the work order for the maintenance staff, and update records on the status of the activity.

Maintenance planners and others with heavy involvement in the maintenance function at each plant will have direct access to Maximo for work order tracking, scheduling and inventory tracking as part of Ford's FTPM system. Ford plans to roll out Maximo functionality in its FTPM suite at 30 plants this year. The software will run for the Oracle 7 database on HP-UX and Digital Alpha Open VMS servers, with Windows 95 clients.

The systems will also be used to facilitate proposal management and customer profiles. After implementation, it is hoped that CML employees will be able to better handle information on customer site locations, current hardware used and warranty details.

The two companies will integrate Aspect's CSM solution, including decision support software (Explore) and a content reference database (Very Important Parts, or VIP), with SAP's R/3 client/server enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to optimize the specification and purchasing of component parts. The agreement was driven by customer demand within electronics and other discrete manufacturing industries, in which most component and supplier decisions are made by design engineers.

Moore Products will incorporate FactorySuite within its APACS process control system; the integrated product will be called ProcessSuite.

Moving electronic product data such as product design and manufacturing information between different software applications has been a complex problem since the start of the information age. The delays and costs associated with this problem range into the hundreds of millions of dollars due to the inefficiencies in trying to share electronic design information. The partnership of IDA and ProSTEP will create a source of data exchange expertise to help customers optimize costs in their development and manufacturing processes.

System ESS provides extensive pricing and promotions capabilities that help ensure accurate and consistent information throughout the order fulfillment process. System ESS also will be integrated with Land O'Lakes' enterprise information systems to enable the company to improve its invoicing and deals settlement process. In order for the settlement process to work effectively, pricing and promotions activities from the sales process must be accurately represented.

Land O'Lakes has also invested heavily in electronic data interchange (EDI), and will use System ESS to further automate EDI transactions.

CLASS MCS interfaces seamlessly to the FACTORYworks MES environment. This interface provides customers with a range of material handling information, including real-time production updates, equipment updates and material inventory records by lot ID. Using toolbar operations on the FACTORYworks Intelligent NT Client, users can query CLASS MCS and view the status and performance characteristics of the material handling equipment.

Employing off-the-shelf FACTORYworks business rules, customers can execute operational scenarios, such as store and retrieve material at each step in the process plan and move material from one piece of equipment to another. This will enable flexible configuration of the system to meet site-specific business and manufacturing requirements.