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I was with a client today who happened to be in the IT organization and he said the new management is considering outsourcing IT.  This is a larger regulated company, with new owners, and new management.  He said they are going to have a very difficult time justifying it because they have traditionally run a very lean IT group, so financially, there was virtually no justification for outsourcing.

This got me thinking though…It is very difficult and sometimes foolish to outsource the manufacturing IT part of IT to traditional IT outsourcing companies.   Let me explain.

There are many facets to “traditional” IT - from infrastructure, help desk, security, applications, communications, etc.  Many of these can be outsourced successfully.  However, for manufacturers, there is also the “manufacturing IT” side of IT, that demands a knowledge of the business, how to integrate with automation and equipment, and the flow of information in the production environment.

Strategically, this is dangerous to outsource because it is so tightly coupled to the business.  Manufacturing IT can be a strategic weapon, and most people don’t treat it that way.  They assume, naively, that IT is just IT.

In an article by Bianca Scholten written for Automation World, a couple of questions were raised:

• Who should champion a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution?
• Who should support an Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution?

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 :-).

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.