Production Process Management is a new way to view, build and evolve the information systems infrastructure and do away with the expensive and overly complex software application silos found in many of today’s global manufacturing enterprises. For many years department-oriented applications were installed and then forced together with systems integration techniques with results that often were outdated before the project went live. Too often, chasing the need to be agile only led to being boxed in whenever the business or technology changed. The result is a data-centric world made up of islands of information instead of strong, vibrant systems of production.
Today, we should view the production process as the basic unit for improvement and automation within an organization and its value chain – a transformation in thinking and IT governance from being data- and application-centric toward being process-centric. The process-centric perspective looks at how the business is managed and how production is accomplished. This is a far cry from discussing ERP (enterprise resource planning), MES (manufacturing execution systems), QAS (quality assurance systems), WMS (warehouse management systems) or any of the other acronyms that have come along. Eliminate the hierarchical ideas behind information systems and use all the tools in the information systems network to most effectively accomplish your business objectives and build your competitive advantage.
Production Process Management is not a technology. Instead it is a framework consisting of process-centric best practices, a model for proper governance, implementation and full life cycle management in a process-centric business, and an IT architecture based on model-driven composition technologies such as those found in Business Process Management. Production Process Management is applied to solve production issues and realize opportunities using the existing legacy application infrastructure to manage and support processes across the enterprise and its value chain. Once you view your business as a set of processes you will wonder why this has taken so long.
Click here to read my next post on this topic, as an example of how process migration can be embraced as viable continuous process improvement strategy when operating with a process-centric framework.
