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The Illustrated MOM – the Path to Operations Excellence

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The need for corporate-wide operations excellence has become well established but the evolution of support manufacturing operations systems lags the requirement. A common operations story is trying to manage a plant and a company’s supply chain with a disjointed collection of legacy departmental IT systems. While each disparate system once made sense, operations demands over the last 15 years increasingly replaced the focus of departmental solutions with an evolving plant-wide Manufacturing Execution System (MES). Moving beyond basic material resource planning of the 1990s, MES focused on production order tracking and WIP material consumption in a single plant; but globalization left no chance to rest on these dated manufacturing IT laurels.

Expanded corporate goals and the global marketplace demanded a larger perspective with systems capable of integrating all activities and delivering actionable information for corporate-scale decision making and managing extended supply chains. The broader concept of Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) was developed to deliver an agile view across multiple plants, their operations capability, and capacity, and each plant’s role in the supply chain. MOM coordinates the activities of each area such as production, maintenance, scheduling, quality and material handling. MOM depends on building out real-time Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) to deliver comprehensive real-time data analysis for actions and responses to improve overall operations effectiveness, agility and quality of any operations state.

The problem remains how to effectively evolve from a menagerie of legacy departmental systems to an integrated functional MOM. Organizations such as ISA and MESA have gathered together industry professionals to study the problem and develop usable roadmaps to define and guide the process.

ISA-95 is the widely accepted guide for the operations transformation journey. The ISA-95 framework has been built into many assessment and requirement tools for connecting plant-floor operations to enterprise applications and reducing the risk, cost and errors associated with integrating enterprise systems with manufacturing operations.

It is a good and proven model, but it does not guarantee instant success. The basics of ISA-95 have been defined for a decade but the hard work continues to fill in the details and integrate real world experience from operations engineering and management attempts to bring high level functioning out of disjointed legacy systems. One group that has taken up this challenge is the ISA-95 Best Practices Working Group.

The ISA group is now publishing their third compendium of best practices - The MOM Chronicles - ISA-95 Best Practices Book 3.0. We are fortunate to have Charlie Gifford, the group Chairman, join us for a web-based discussion of the new book and the latest thinking on MOM best practices. Register now for the March 7 event to join the discussion .