A Perfect Plant !!

What Is a Perfect Plant?

It’s an ideal meant to serve as a blueprint for your own manufacturing transformation, helping you prioritize when and where you should devote resources to produce steady, incremental improvements to your manufacturing processes.

In the perfect plant, you have visibility into all aspects of your manufacturing operations. You can optimize your use of manufacturing assets and drive increased production performance — all in concert with enterprise-wide plans and objectives.

In a perfect plant, personnel no longer waste effort constantly reacting to line failures, supply network disruptions, and operations emergencies.

Manufacturing employees can anticipate change and devise innovative solutions that improve production efficiency, optimally use assets, and reduce waste. Information and processes across your production network deliver

timely, context-sensitive, actionable intelligence. Production managers, supervisors, and operators can use this intelligence to plan and drive responsive execution that exceeds your delivery, quality, and cost objectives.

Becoming a perfect plant involves leveraging your investment in enterprise applications, exploiting your existing manufacturing infrastructure and data sources, and delivering simplified business processes to frontline operators.

How to Become a Perfect Plant: 5 Strategic Steps

With your key metrics in mind, the drive toward the perfect plant includes the following core actions:

· Coordinate the aggregation and analysis of global demand. To have the perfect order, you must clearly see demand across every market and tie it into production.

· Integrate data flowing from enterprise applications and planning and execution systems into a single, harmonized flow of information; it’s critical to coordinate across network partners, suppliers, and customers to deliver that perfect order. In addition, having the ability to combine and recombine systems to support new processes — without ripping and replacing the underlying functionality — is the technological underpinning of the perfect plant.

· Plan accurately. Your ability to do so improves immensely when your systems are completely integrated and you have clear demand signals arriving from your enterprise systems. These systems provide real-time updates to keep the plant informed about strategic changes, and automatically relay local events and disruptions to decision makers. This way, the entire company can react more responsively.

· Embed intelligence into your planning and execution systems. Successful planning and execution depends on your ability to parse, collect, and analyze data arriving from the shop floor and present it in context-appropriate forms for plant managers, the vice president of operations, and the CEO. Greater integration with planning systems means the shop floor can adapt quickly to changes caused by disruptions elsewhere in the business.

· Execute responsively by identifying what is important to your organization’s strategic advantage and deploying execution systems accordingly. This means connecting local systems accordingly. This means connecting local execution processes to business operations in the context of your operating environment. Sometimes it’s as simple as providing work instructions to operators; other times it includes capturing detailed information to support tracking and tracing components to their last identifiable source. Ensure that your execution system provides the flexibility you need to rapidly compose new applications and business processes unique to your environment to support any changes in manufacturing operating requirements.

Each industry and customer must prioritize these steps differently. A consumer goods manufacturer might focus on coordination and planning first, as assessing global demand and harnessing it to develop and launch new products is a top priority. A high tech manufacturer, on the other hand, is more worried about rapidly ramping up production of a hot new product, which requires tight integration between planning and execution systems.

Summary

The perfect plant is a new manufacturing paradigm. It’s an idealistic yet achievable vision that helps an organization align its manufacturing strategy with its corporate objectives, and one that helps IT make its technology decisions more strategic. The pursuit of the perfect plant empowers plant personnel, operations, and IT to collectively design, prioritize, and implement plant strategies. SAP is armed with solutions that are ready to help you make this manufacturing transformation.

Source: SAP Insider - Business Process Excellence

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S.Suren
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