Breaking down barriers

A fully integrated collaborative manufacturing strategy can improve business and production operations. Honeywell's Benjamin Bryant discusses the benefits of breaking down the barriers that stand between decisions and implementation

In recent years, the focus on collaborative manufacturing has grown. The concept sets out to optimise business performance by removing the traditional physical and logical barriers that have stood in the way of the manufacturing process from decision making to execution.

With fully collaborative manufacturing, a new value chain is created, allowing data integration and harmonisation of internal and external processes – delivering more value for end-customers and increased profitability. The promise of collaborative manufacturing is reduced risk and a greater ability to meet customer specifications and delivery schedules, at a lower overall cost to the manufacturer.

Honeywell's chemicals and life science industry solutions business recently delivered its collaborative manufacturing strategy (CMS) for process industries. It enables companies to have real-time coordination, visibility and responsiveness across the enterprise – along with tighter collaboration with supply chain partners – allowing manufacturers to turn improved information and workflow into better financial performance.

'Honeywell is providing, through its CMS, the newest web-based technologies that tie plant operations to the extended supply chain and link the production floor to the executive floor,' said Wayne Castner, Honeywell vp for hi-spec, batch, in the chemicals and life sciences industry solutions business.

Honeywell's CMS aims to bridge the gap between decisions and effective execution, enabling:

'With Honeywell's collaborative manufacturing capabilities, manufacturers have increased visibility into plant operations and across the supply chain, providing the ability to identify new business and improvement opportunities, and the agility to translate these opportunities into profitable operating decisions,' explains Castner. 'The manufacturer also has a real-time awareness of operations performance, using measurement against targets and potential capabilities.

'In addition, comparison and analysis of performance data from various sites is possible, enabling the manufacturer to learn from top performers.'

effective interaction

By means of inventory management, order management and customer services are fine-tuned to meet current market requirements. And business processes are designed to enable and foster continuous improvement, creativity and innovation.

The key to this advanced capability is Honeywell's collaborative manufacturing platform – a software infrastructure and business framework that enables users to interact effectively throughout a company and across the extended supply chain.

An even more specific platform, serving the life sciences and consumer packaged goods industries, based around Honeywell's POMS technology, is being developed as Honeywell's Unified Manufacturing eXchange or UMx (see figure 1). The platform leverages existing investments and integrates all plant and business applications and data resources to make information broadly accessible by both people and applications.

It employs the latest technologies to provide a web interface to support collaboration on documents, reports and process displays, with notification and approval being done automatically and online. The technologies increase the speed and quality of information, enable enhanced workflow, and improve decision-making capability. Every employee who needs access to operational results can have personal portals to data and information that are specific to individual interests, with the ability to drill down to relevant details.

The platform supports the creation of business intelligence, the functioning of knowledge repositories in an integrated, scalable and fully interoperable fashion, while at the same time providing extensive security. 'The advanced application software and services have been specifically developed for achieving and sustaining collaborative manufacturing throughout the organisation and across the supply chain,' concludes Castner.