Superficially, there appears to be little to distinguish IQMS (www.iqms.com), a small, quiet, privately-held company, from other lower-end enterprise application competitors. Its global presence, annual revenue, profile, and even its products may appear to have features akin, if not alike to its competitors. However, along with targeting a niche market of repetitive manufacturing, particularly for the injection plastics molding/extruding and rubber industries, this Paso Robles, California (US) company has other notable features. In particular, what may be true distinguishing is that IQMS offers applications and services typically expected from much larger, tier one vendors—often going beyond. Namely, the product is so complete that it does not involve third-party products (other than some reporting facilities). Its natively-built features go beyond the customer relationship management (CRM) or HR/Payroll capabilities, which are often found in other products, but only as third party solutions that are embedded, standard configurations leaving customers oblivious to modules' origins.
Part three of the IQMS Prospers by Helping Enterprises Work Smarter series
So how many other ERP vendors, including the largest ones, have natively built-in, real-time production monitoring, electronic data interchange (EDI), and complete quality management systems? Well, almost none when it comes to integrating ERP and manufacturing execution systems (MES). MES, as defined by the Manufacturing Enterprise Systems Association (MESA International) is essentially any system that uses current and accurate data, triggers, and reports on plant activities as events occur. From electronic production management systems to shop-floor data capture, an MES manages operations from the point-of-order-release to manufacturing, to point-of-product-delivery to finished goods. The potential of integrating and providing all elements of a complete manufacturing solution, at least from a same source, if not as a single computing platform, has always been tempting, and potentially lucrative. However, it has never been delivered, not even by the once mighty Invensys. The company that once had Baan, Marcam, Avantis, and Wonderware, and their respective ERP and MES products under its roof, never delivered the software together. (see The Name and Ownership Change Roulette Wheel for Marcam Stops at SSA Global—Part Three: Last-Ditch Effort by Invensys). For a detailed discussion of what integration means to manufacturers, see Manufacturer's Nirvana—Real-Time Actionable Information.
Thus, IQMS might be unique, not only within its mid-market realm, but in the entire ERP arena. By providing the powerful IQ RealTime Production Monitoring module, it ensures plant efficiency by identifying poor machine performance before problems occur. The module provides automatic production tracking by wiring hardware directly to production machines. A special user touch screen to simplify data entry can be created for shop floor personnel to provide a virtually real-time data flow to and from the shop floor. Thus it brings production and ERP information together and informs both office and plant personnel about what is exactly happening on the plant floor through color-coded screens. For example, yellow would indicate that a machine is down, while green would mean it is in production.
Captured real-time information can include cycle times, machine efficiency, and scrap percentage. The machine operator can enter timely production; backflush raw materials; print labels; change cavitation as necessary and "on the fly"; assign labor; record rejects with user-defined codes; enter downtime with user-defined codes; and view internal or external documents. With this last example, part production, setup control, material staging, quality control, overall plant performance etc. can be seen. All of these information chunks increase data integrity and reduce transaction costs, given that complete access to ERP functionality automatically updates the production schedule and generates production reports. Without such a module, gathering actual production information is a time consuming, tedious, and highly subjective task. The reconciliation of the actual data on the floor with the planned data in ERP is often delayed for days, if not weeks, resulting in no actionable information.
Part three of the IQMS Prospers by Helping Enterprises Work Smarter series
So how many other ERP vendors, including the largest ones, have natively built-in, real-time production monitoring, electronic data interchange (EDI), and complete quality management systems? Well, almost none when it comes to integrating ERP and manufacturing execution systems (MES). MES, as defined by the Manufacturing Enterprise Systems Association (MESA International) is essentially any system that uses current and accurate data, triggers, and reports on plant activities as events occur. From electronic production management systems to shop-floor data capture, an MES manages operations from the point-of-order-release to manufacturing, to point-of-product-delivery to finished goods. The potential of integrating and providing all elements of a complete manufacturing solution, at least from a same source, if not as a single computing platform, has always been tempting, and potentially lucrative. However, it has never been delivered, not even by the once mighty Invensys. The company that once had Baan, Marcam, Avantis, and Wonderware, and their respective ERP and MES products under its roof, never delivered the software together. (see The Name and Ownership Change Roulette Wheel for Marcam Stops at SSA Global—Part Three: Last-Ditch Effort by Invensys). For a detailed discussion of what integration means to manufacturers, see Manufacturer's Nirvana—Real-Time Actionable Information.
Thus, IQMS might be unique, not only within its mid-market realm, but in the entire ERP arena. By providing the powerful IQ RealTime Production Monitoring module, it ensures plant efficiency by identifying poor machine performance before problems occur. The module provides automatic production tracking by wiring hardware directly to production machines. A special user touch screen to simplify data entry can be created for shop floor personnel to provide a virtually real-time data flow to and from the shop floor. Thus it brings production and ERP information together and informs both office and plant personnel about what is exactly happening on the plant floor through color-coded screens. For example, yellow would indicate that a machine is down, while green would mean it is in production.
Captured real-time information can include cycle times, machine efficiency, and scrap percentage. The machine operator can enter timely production; backflush raw materials; print labels; change cavitation as necessary and "on the fly"; assign labor; record rejects with user-defined codes; enter downtime with user-defined codes; and view internal or external documents. With this last example, part production, setup control, material staging, quality control, overall plant performance etc. can be seen. All of these information chunks increase data integrity and reduce transaction costs, given that complete access to ERP functionality automatically updates the production schedule and generates production reports. Without such a module, gathering actual production information is a time consuming, tedious, and highly subjective task. The reconciliation of the actual data on the floor with the planned data in ERP is often delayed for days, if not weeks, resulting in no actionable information.
No comments:
Post a Comment