The 4 Misunderstanding About Manufacturing Systems Implementations

A few weeks ago I attended the ISPE annual meeting in Orlando. My company was hosting a session about technology and operational excellence that was pretty well attended. I take that as a sign of general interest in the topic. I believe that the interest was on the pure operational excellent side, yet the session tried to highlight the synergies that exist between manufacturing systems and operational excellence.

My colleague Carsten Holm Pedersen held a talk on the synergies between systems and operational excellence. The main theme of his talk was what he called “The 4 Myths” about manufacturing information systems or as I refer to them as “The 4 Misunderstanding” about Manufacturing System implementations. I really liked his message so I wanted to share it here.

Focus ROI
Sole focus on ROI ensures success because it defines qualitative business goals and sets a defined scope. However this also means that focus is diverted to “easy wins” rather than usable solutions and enhancement that have obvious value are ignored or rejected as “scope creep”. Furthermore there is risk that synergies from process improvement and other OpEx initiatives are not incorporated or supported by the system.


Use of Standard Systems
Application of standard systems is more effective and guarantees use of “Best Practices”. They reduce risk and provide superior maintainability. The reality is that these so-called “Best Practices” are not necessarily a good fit to your process and sometimes they are not “best” at all, but simply a result of “that is the way we have always done it” thinking. As such they sometimes do not provide the flexibility or adaptability to specific processes and force unnecessary constraints. Focus is diverted to “What we can buy” rather than “What we need”.


Competitive approaches increase productivity
Employing a competitive approach where different projects are competing for the same funds motivates and steers project teams to achieve better results. In fact just the contrary is true, this approach only ensures sub-optimization. It inhibits collaboration and does not leverage the inherent need for systems to be built to support the process. Systems are built to provide specific point solutions and not enable a streamlined lean manufacturing process or superior process understanding.


Integration should be avoided.
Interoperability between systems is not that important and if it is implemented has to be in real time. On the contrary one of the inherent attributes of Manufacturing Systems is interoperability with all levels in the manufacturing process. Not including interoperability with other system may seriously inhibit the usability of a solution and some obvious benefits to process visibility may be ignored. Also each interface may have different “real-time” requirements that have to be evaluated by needs and value.

There is obviously much more to these than what I can put in this post so let me know what you think and make sure to follow Carsten for more discussion on these topics.

Next week at AdvaMed2010 in DC

Next week I will be attending AdvaMed2010 in Washington DC in an attempt to mingle with the top of the food chain of the Medical Device industry. If you didn’t know AdvaMed is the premier industry organization for the Medical Device industry and the AdvaMed2010 conference is its annual meeting. Essentially it is a place for smaller Med Device companies to market themselves to venture capitalist and larger companies.

Medical Devices is one of our core markets at NNE Pharmaplan and hence we are hoping to leverage this event to make ourselves better known in the industry. Kind of old school marketing but I am hoping that there is value there? I look forward to an interesting week and getting to meet some interesting companies and people. Also last time I have been to DC is in 1995 so I am long due. If you are around give me a shout.

"Lean technology" a Manufacturing Systems perspective

My colleagues and I are in the process of preparing an educational session that will be held at the ISPE annual event in November. So as usual I spend some time looking through my archives for relevant material that I already have – I call it 're-cycling' :-). This time I came across something that I never published or used and so I thought I would share it here. It is an attempt to explore the synergies of the Lean and Manufacturing Systems concepts. Read and tell me what you think…

Manufacturing Technology; A familiar phrase considered part of the everyday vocabulary. What about Lean Technology? Not a common phrase, but the idea of lean manufacturing supported through technology should be as much a part of the vocabulary as Manufacturing Technology. Lean thinking advocates simplification of manufacturing units so they can be more easily shifted to enable the flow of value. So in essence the “lean technology” concept supplements lean thinking by combining state-of-the-art manufacturing with advanced software systems in an integrated environment.

Using information systems in lean manufacturing is not a new concept, nor is it new to the lean movement. Many examples exist that prove that manufacturing (software) system can support a lean organization. Unfortunately most commonly information technology systems for manufacturing tend to become large monolithic systems of great complexity. They are designed to provide generic functionality to fit major industry verticals that can be configured specifically for each implementation. At the same time the uniqueness and the complexities of the specific manufacturing operations make the ability to only configure these solutions more a myth than reality. Most of the system vendors will of course argue against this - however the reality is that in order to meet the requirements of the manufacturing businesses they are forced to implement complex customizations. That is what I wrote on my post about Customize or Compromise.

Although lean thinking advocates the application of a set of specific common concepts, the actual implementation of these concepts in real life tends to be unique to each production line and plant. Information systems that are used to support these lean lines and plants have to be able to provide common functionality to support these concepts. Yet, they also have to be able to support the uniqueness of each implementation. Furthermore they need to be able to support the changes that are inherent in a lean system due to the continuous improvements as they are accomplished.

In summary here is my suggestion for the general functionality of a Manufacturing System that can support a Lean manufacturing environment. (BTW I know that these go against the grain by not using a problem-oriented approach – I will have to redefine this ASAP)

• Value stream: We all know that value is identified by the specific needs of the customer hence the Manufacturing System should be usable and implementable to support only these specific processes that add value. In other words the system once implemented should not require or be constrained to use extra processes or involves extra steps if they are not directly part of the value flow.
• Implement flow: The Manufacturing System should employ a value centric process model that is easily managed and accessible to all the relevant people. This will allow a transparent view of the value flow and thus allow engineers and operators to ensure production flow, be it a one-piece flow, supermarkets, or other relevant Lean solutions.
• Execute Pull: This is kind of the obvious requirement that involves the enablement of pull execution and dispatching of WIP. This may include features and functionality to enable or enforce flow and managing kanbans, supermarkets, balancing, etc.
• Enable Perfection: Enable perfection by providing the production and process visibility needed for the continuous improvement efforts. This is the part of the system that provides Intelligence (a topic that I have written a few relevant posts about). In addition the Manufacturing System should provide adequate configurability, extendibility and customizability that support continuous improvement.

I am back, sorry for the delay...

It has been a while since I posted something here, and I have a long list of bad excuses. (Here is the last one).

It has been a very exciting and busy time for me and my family. We have relocated from Indiana to the San Francisco Bay Area with all the excitement and hard work that follows. I guess that we are getting settled now so I am going to try and pick-up the blogging just a bit. I have quite a few interesting things to share so I hope find some time over the next month to do some more blogging.

I have been involved in some very interesting projects. I am working with BioMarin helping them figure out what MES will work best for them and some of the strategies around implementation. I have also had a short stint with Amgen looking at their Manufacturing Business Intelligence initiative. Apart from that I have been involved with a few of the Bay Area Biotech companies while at the same time trying to find new customers in North America.

On the event front I am planning to be at CBI's annual MES event (San Diego, in Sep.), AdvaMed (Washington DC, in Oct.), and the ISPE annual meeting (Orlando, Nov.) where we are organizing an educational session on Operational Excellence. So if you are going to be at any of these events let me know so we can catch-up. It’s going to be an interesting and busy period.

My Presentation at the MESA 2010 Annual Conference

In June I will be presenting at the MESA 2010 North American conference. The conference is going to be held in Dearborn, MI (near Detriot) hosted by Ford at their conference facility. I wanted to share the abstract here on my blog. I will be co-presenting with Kasper Larsen from Novo Nordisk and my colleague from NNE Pharmaplan, Asger Sharp-Johansen

The presentation shares our experiences from the current global MES rollout project at Novo Nordisk. This is an ongoing long term multi faceted project that involves a staggered deployment of a commercial MES software package to all of Novo Nordisk’s manufacturing sites.

Deploying a new manufacturing system is a complex and risky proposition for any company, rolling out such a system to multiple sites on a global scale may be even considered scary. In order to mitigate the risks and manage the complexity of this immense undertaking Novo Nordisk makes the best use of people and technology to evolve a best practice approach that is continually improved upon. This approach includes technical and organizational aspects that cover the complete life cycle of the manufacturing system’s deployment. In addition the “out-of-the-box” feature set of the software obviously did not suffice and navigating this predicament, coined as "Customize or Compromise", is another interesting topic.

Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with 87 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care, haemophilia care, growth hormone therapy, and hormone replacement therapy. It has international production facilities and employs more than 29,300 employees in 76 countries.

It has been a while...

It has been a very long while since I have posted anything on this blog. Hopefully this will change – starting right now.

I have just started a new job with NNE Pharmaplan and it looks like a very exciting opportunity. If you did not know NNE Pharmaplan is an engineering consultancy firm focusing on the Life Science industry. The company is quite large and also well known in Europe. With renewed focus on North America I will be responsible for helping Life Science customers with their Manufacturing Systems efforts.

This new opportunity is taking me back to my core expertise – Manufacturing Systems (I don’t like to call it MES – Manufacturing Execution Systems because of narrow and misleading perceptions, but more on this in a later post). That being said I still plan to spend time on new media marketing and hopefully help with some new ideas at NNE Pharmaplan.

So watch this space for some interesting discussions and opinions…