In a desire for better quality and continuous improvement, companies and industries are looking to take advantage of all the data that is available when manufacturing goods. The most obvious reason is to avoid embarrassing recalls that can damage brands and take years to recover from. But, in most cases, it’s companies looking to advance their capabilities to meet increased market demand for better quality products in a shorter time frame. The opportunity to gradually ramp up production and quality are gone. Product lifecycles have become significantly compressed, so manufacturers no longer have this luxury anymore.Much has been written on this topic, so you might wonder why I’m writing this post – and two others as a follow up – as a series. The reason is that the issue is moving very quickly—faster than some manufacturers can keep up with. As a result, this topic is now starting to have a major business impact.

In this series, I’ll look at how global traceability is about to move beyond defensive measures to become one of the next big-data frontiers for business improvement. Then I’ll discuss why manufacturing enterprises need to start moving now instead of playing catch up later. For this article, I want to address a very basic question: Why isn’t a global MOM (Manufacturing Operations Management) enough and why should manufacturers invest specifically in a global traceability solution?

MOM is Critical, but Still Only a Starting Point

Global manufacturers are moving rapidly from the old siloed, plant-level Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to enterprise Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solutions that provide a more broader perspective on how to manage operations as an enterprise capability. This means a consolidated vantage point on how to manage plant and supply chain operations. One of the many benefits of implementing a MOM is improved quality and traceability. Specifically, this type of solution can provide:

• Governance and standardization of best practices—discover and deploy improved practices across the enterprise
• Common master data—a single version of the truth is essential for visibility and understanding
• Capture of all events—a MOM captures all “5M” events of interest (Man, Machine, Material, Method, Measurement)

Why isn’t that enough? It’s certainly better than the “old” days when there was little or no visibility into production. However, the stakes are much higher today. MOM systems can now be significantly extended in terms of quality and traceability.

To put it simply, MOM is focused on the “now.” MOM is all about what is being built today or this week, and maintaining the associated data required while parts and materials are active in the manufacturing process. MOM is addressing the need for speed, and not having a massive amount of data being processed that might slow down production systems.

Of course, this concept is counter to today’s obsession with data, and the desire to collect more and more of it. Here is where Global Traceability comes in.

1. Global cross-instance traceability. Today’s manufacturing environment is highly distributed, in terms of how finished goods are produced, delivered, and maintained. The complexity of managing production and product supply networks makes it difficult to trace activities across operations and suppliers. A global traceability solution can connect the dots across instances, providing a single view both forward and backward across multiple sites and systems. Problems that would take days or weeks to trace can be solved in minutes, leading to rapid containment and minimal impact.
2. Handling mid- and long-term big data. Increasingly, manufacturers must archive data to meet regulatory and/or customer requirements. This means storing vast amounts of historical trace data for a long period of time, while offering online availability. Imagine a typical scenario where key components are serially tracked, a Bill of Materials (BOM) structure is complicated, and production is extremely high volume. All of this data must be archived and retrievable for analysis at any time—indeed, at a moment’s notice. This is too big a task for a MOM, but it’s exactly what global traceability solutions are designed for.
3. Third-party collaboration. To achieve true end-to-end global traceability, you need integration with multiple third-parties—from suppliers and logistics companies to end customers. And, this integration may need to change quickly if a supplier should go bankrupt or have a production disruption. A global traceability system will integrate all this data to create a single repository for real-time visibility and control, along with user apps and interfaces that present the right information in the proper context. Most importantly, this type of system will retain the precious knowledge of what materials and components were part of what build process, part, final assembly and ultimately, each final product – a truly daunting task.

Conclusion

An enterprise MOM solution, while a key component to managing manufacturing operations, is not a global traceability solution. Rather, it provides the platform and data that make a global traceability solution possible. When viewed as an incremental investment, and as a way to leverage the investment in an existing MOM solution, adding a global traceability capability is very easy to justify.

So far, manufacturers have used global traceability primarily as a defensive measure to contain a problem. Now they’re beginning to realize that this type of solution can be leveraged for much, much more. Global traceability is poised to be a driver and enabler for process and operational improvements, and could be “the next big thing” in manufacturing big data. In Part 2 of this series, I’ll look at how some actual manufacturers are capitalizing on global traceability to create new business value through new and deeper visibility.

If you liked this article, here are others you might also find interesting:

• 5 Reasons to Invest in Global Traceability
• 5 Key IT Enablers for Enterprise Product Traceability and Containment
• The Competitive Advantage of Global Traceability