Rolling Out A Unified Factory Information System

Are you are faced with trying to implement standardised systems at a manufacturing operations level across all your sites, perhaps across a number of countries? Not only must you choose an application that meets the diverse needs of all the sites, you also need to work with a partner who has the capability and experience of deploying systems across multiple countries and different cultures and in different languages – one who understands the very real issues confronting you.

“We are rolling out Shopfloor-Online as our standard quality system across 39 factories in Europe and Africa. It’s already delivering results and given us some very significant opportunities for standardisation. Now we’re planning to build on this by adding the Spoilage module.”

Steve French - European Quality Director, Crown Food Europe

Different sites, standardised information

Most major manufacturing companies operating from multiple sites, often in a number of countries in different continents, have already standardised on one enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or are in the course of doing so.

Centralised ERP systems have enabled commonality in terms of accounting and administrative processes, but not manufacturing operations. The sheer scope and diversity at this level made it unattainable – too difficult even to contemplate – with the costs outweighing the likely returns.

For example, one of the key problems is that the closer you get to the sharp end of production, the more variation in equipment, customers, products and working practices, even for those companies whose operations are superficially identical.

With factories in the same group being built or acquired at different times it virtually guarantees that these differences exist. In corporations with different business groups the diversity problems are magnified.

Increasingly companies see that introducing standard systems at an operations level will bring huge benefits. This gives rise to the need for standard systems that are flexible enough to cope with the numerous demands and capable of being deployed on a multi-national basis.

The Shopfloor-Online MES Factory Information System has already been rolled out in 44 countries and in 11 languages, with Lighthouse working successfully in partnership with global companies in the aerospace, packaging and automotive industries.

Until now, for most companies the answer has been to address key areas such as quality, inventory tracking, maintenance and so on in isolation. This makes it viable to install standard systems across a number of plants, but it’s still not an entirely satisfactory solution.

At a plant level, users are forced to dip in and out of a variety of systems to get the data they need and they’re faced with different user interfaces that they have to learn. IT has to build and maintain interfaces between systems and those systems have to be supported. It works as far as it goes, but it lacks the power, robustness, speed and cost-effectiveness of a unified solution such as Shopfloor-Online MES.

Shopfloor-Online MES offers companies the ability to introduce a standardised system, component by component, in a phased and manageable roll-out. It contains all the data that anyone in the organisation needs and being web based it’s easily accessible to all.

Each component such as quality, customer complaints, plant performance, spoilage and maintenance stands up as best-in-class in its own right, so there’s no compromise in opting for the modular solution.

You have the ability to set up an organisation-wide quality system in the first year, activate the OEE module the following year and so on until you end up with a fully-integrated Factory Information System – effectively funded by the savings generated by the introduction of each module in turn.

For users there are fewer systems to learn and one place to go to access all the information they need. For IT there’s less to support, less to maintain, and it’s future-proof. And best of all, the applications can share the same IT infrastructure, yielding big savings in deployment and cost of ownership.