As I was reading and catching up tonight, I just could not help but see the stark contrast in stories between Walgreens and General Motors.
Walgreens - Employees at This Walgreens Distribution Center Are More Able Than Disabled
http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2008/02/need-some-eager.html
General Motors - GM offers buyouts to 74,000
I know GM must do something to stop bleeding money, but it never fails that those companies that take care of their employees are healthier companies.
In an article by Bianca Scholten written for Automation World, a couple of questions were raised:
In this article, Bianca sites engineering and IT as the two functions within a manufacturing environment that could potentially support an MES solution. I would also add operations and quality has two functions that need to be involved in MES solutions. The customers of MES solutions are most likely to be operations and quality. The providers of MES solutions are most likely to be engineering and IT.
In nearly 12 years of providing MES solutions, we have found that the most successful projects are when there is a great cross functional team that works together to define and provide the solution. Most of our projects have been owned by the IT organization within the factory. This works best when an IT organization is a “manufacturing IT” organization not an “administrative IT” organization.
Standards, best practices, and knowledge sharing, are all ways to help disciplines work together. But at the end of the day, the best solutions are going to come out of teams that work together to define the problem, implement a maintainable solution, and drive business results with that solution. This is way easier said than done. Maybe the source of another post :-).
I have sold and worked with sales people that sell manufacturing solutions for my whole career. Here are some thoughts on what it takes to be successful - and - what I think works best with the customer:
1. Listen - find out what the customer is trying to do. Often sales people talk WAY TO TECHNICALLY, WAY TO EARLY in the process.
2. Talk with their terms - use their terms for everything. Customers don’t care that you call it a Production Order - if they call it a Work Order, you should call it a work order.
3. Demonstrate with their data - a standard demo does not work with these complex solutions. Take your customer’s data, terms, routes, parts, etc. and configure your software to demonstrate their processes.
Of course, there are many other selling tips and tricks, but these are some of the basics. Good luck selling.
We have a term for people that try to do something they are not quite equipped to do - “Technically Dangerous” or TDs for short. As in “they are a little technically dangerous” or “they are TD.” We often run into these interesting types who are trying to write software, program automation, or otherwise “tinker” with manufacturing systems because, well they can….tinker that is.
So why are there Technically Dangerous people out there putting solutions in place to run our factories? You want some examples? I though I would describe these solutions with how they were presented to me. This is what I hear:
“Don’t minimize that, it will crash, and we will have to restart it.”
“Once a day we have to get everyone out of the system and rebuild the database”
“We have to reboot our MES system twice a week for preventative maintenance, otherwise the memory leaks will crash the system”
“We want to push compressed data from our data historian out to an Oracle database [uncompressed] so our IT guys can get it.”
My passion is to help the “technically dangerous” people of the world do a better job, as well as protect manufacturers from making mistakes that cost a lot of time and money.
I gave myself the title on the ManufIT blog of Chief Translator of Opportunities. I really hope I can be a benefit to manufacturing leaders that want to really use IT solutions to better their operations and quality.
The next time you suspect that you are inheriting or witnessing the installation of a solution that could be labeled as “technically dangerous” drop me a line and let me review it with you. It would be my pleasure. Contact me here.
I am really curious to see how blogs like the the Manufit.com blog or any other social networking site for engineers, Lean practitioners, or manufacturing leaders will work out.
There is certainly some value in this phenomenon of online posting, blogging, and networking. The question is, will people find answers to questions they are asking? Will they take the time to read feeds from these sites? Who will use these site, and will they find value.
I will continue to create links to site like this as the Manufit.com blog gets going.
Check out SME’s new social network at:
https://smeconnection.leveragesoftware.com/default.aspx
