E-Manufacturing

E-Manufacturing

ABSTRACT:

Historically, manufacturing in its narrow sense – the shop floor where the actual Work was done – has been viewed in isolation. It was certainly isolated from the Rest of the supply chain, and probably isolated even within the manufacturing enterprise.

In fact, great care was taken to decouple the plant from the risks of supplier shortages and fluctuations in customer demand. The factory operated as an autonomous unit, with its own set of goals and parameters, such as building at the lowest cost per unit or matching output to meet national stockholding levels. While this is a simple model for managing a factory, it is also inefficient and inflexible. It also ignores the essential driver that differentiates the companies that are succeeding in today’s Internet-driven economy: Response to customer demand, The Internet brings both a threat and an opportunity to manufacturers. The threat from e-commerce is that it gives customers greater opportunities than ever before to search the world for alternative sources of supply. It exposes even small local manufacturers to multi-national competition, and companies Unable to deliver what the customer wants will suffer as a result.

But the opportunity lies in e-manufacturing. Businesses that harness the power of the Internet are making huge gains in efficiency, both by reducing the friction inside their own business and by binding suppliers more tightly into the supply chain.
The factory floor is still where the value is added in every manufacturing enterprise. But in almost every industry, tightly integrated supply chains, such as that developed successfully by Dell Computers, are emerging. In these models, it is essential to make the connection from the shop floor to the top floor where management decisions are made, and on to the wider supply chain.

In other words, e-manufacturing is a critical part of e-commerce. Access to information is becoming more important than ever, as managers attempt to balance customers’ demands for shorter lead times, smaller batches and lower costs with the need to understand the true capacity of the plant and so find ways to make it more efficient.

The maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) organisation, so long viewed as a necessary evil is now being integrated into the e-manufacturing operation. By using strategies that are predictive not just preventative, maintenance is seen as an opportunity to prevent unnecessary downtime, increase plant availability and improve productivity.

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