Orlando 08 Pages

ARC's Twelfth Annual Orlando Forum

Winning Strategies and Best Practices for Global Manufacturers

February 4-7, 2008 - Orlando, Florida

Manufacturers from All Disciplines Discuss Key Challenges at ARC Forum

The 2008 ARC Forum in Orlando highlighted some of the key challenges faced by end users across all manufacturing disciplines.  If you ever wanted to know the common challenges faced by the chemicals, aerospace, life sciences, and automotive industries, all you had to do was be present at the keynote segment of the forum.  End users from Dow, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and General Motors talked about some of the recent key projects they implemented, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome.  Many of these revolved around common themes of getting the best possible performance out of your employees and your partners, leveraging standardization while making room for site specific requirements, and leveraging technology to create a real business value proposition. 

Dow Uses Collaborative Approach to Build World Class Engineering Center
Maggi Walker, Vice President of Engineering Solutions, Technology Centers, and Manufacturing & Engineering Work Process for Dow spoke of the challenges that Dow faced building a world-class engineering center in Chennai, India, which was opened in November of 2007.  Dow's philosophy is that engineering needs to be where their businesses are, and this includes rapidly emerging regions such as India.  According to Maggi, the engineering enterprise at Dow is not an island, but an "archipelago", consisting of internal staff, engineering firms, and other resource providers from inside and outside of Dow.  The need for reliance on outside parties becomes especially pronounced in regions where Dow may not have a lot of experience in project execution.  The need for collaboration in these cases is paramount, and Dow tries to make it a two way street, learning from their partners as their partners learn from them. 

Maggi also emphasized the importance of utilizing the local workforce.  Emerging regions need to be supported by people in those regions.  Using a local workforce means more commitment and ownership.  Support must be provided in a way that is disciplined, but flexible and able to address the requirements of local areas. 

Collaboration is also a key factor in success in an engineering organization that includes many areas of expertise from process automation to process engineering, process safety, design, project engineering, construction management, and procurement.  Dow believes that by maintaining substantial in house expertise in these areas, they can better collaborate with suppliers and find the best solution for their requirements.  

Boeing Adopts New Manufacturing Methodology for Dreamliner
Tim Opitz, Director of Production Operations, Support and Services for Boeing, discussed his company's challenges in moving to a completely new method of manufacturing for the company's 787 Dreamliner, a new airplane made of out of new materials and offering unique advantages, such as use of composite materials and 30 percent fuel savings over conventional aircraft. 

Not only is Boeing using new materials and technologies in the plane that are state of the art, they are using new tools, especially in the systems arena, to build the plane.  Boeing collaborated with 14 major companies and gave them extended and additional roles, allowing them to deliver sections that are designed, built, certified, and delivered to Boeing by their partners all ready to be installed.  This allowed Boeing to develop and build in parallel, reducing time to market significantly. 

Since Boeing was outsourcing a lot of the assembly, the company needed to have a single source of 3-D data available across the globe.  Single source data also allows Boeing's customers to build their statement of work and determine what they want the plane to look like in a matter of hours.  The suppliers instantly have access to this data and can start building the plane based on the same data the customer specified.  This same data is used throughout the lifecycle of the product. 

Bristol-Myers Squibb's Manufacturing Operations Philosophy
Francis Sidnam, Director of Manufacturing Process Systems and Global Biologics Information Management for Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), discussed his company's execution of a completely integrated manufacturing facility.  According to Francis, the Manufacturing Process Systems Group is the first real corporate automation group in BMS.  The company has had global engineering groups performing automation projects in the past, but has now combined resources in various levels of their model, bringing level one and two groups to combine with level 3 groups for integration into the enterprise.  BMS calls this their Manufacturing Operations Philosophy (MOP).  The first project at BMS to incorporate this MOP philosophy is the large-scale cell culture facility (LSCC) in Devens, Massachusetts.  

Standardization is a big part of BMS' plan.  BMS is implementing ISA 88 and ISA 95 standards and the supporting MSA infrastructure.  The company is also implementing standard electronic work instructions to assist in the reduction of unintentional errors that occur when following manual SOPs. 

The company is driving standardization to support technology transfer and regulatory compliance, and they are bringing these practices to its other plants outside of the Devens facility, such as Puerto Rico.  In the area of MES work instructions, for example, BMS has developed 75 MES work instructions specifically for its Puerto Rico facility and about another 125 for the Devens facility, but there is a lot of overlap and reuse in these instructions.  The Manufacturing Process Systems Group gets the sites to work together to roll out standard functionality throughout the network.  Essentially, they are looking at a 20 -30 percent reduction in installation costs through standardization from the second and third site on down the line after standardizing on the first system. 

Panel Discussion Highlights People, Processes, Technology
After these three initial end user presentations, Ken Knight, Executive Director of Manufacturing Engineering for Controls Conveyors Robotics and Welding (CCRW) for General Motors, was invited to participate in the panel discussion with the other presenters.  Ken had some remarks on globalization and the need for standards to kick off the discussion.  Ken stated that if you have any visions of becoming a global player and have not yet executed, it is probably too late to become a leader, but not too late to become a nimble follower.  Being an international company does not make you a global company.  You need an integrated system and an integrated strategy.  From a standpoint of best practices, you have to mine those from your organization.  Globalization has two components, act global, but think local.  Allow for local customs, practices, and cost saving opportunities.  Globalization without standards is chaos, but there must be opportunities for local trends and cost saving opportunities. 

In a question directed at Francis Sidnam, one end user asked how BMS handled mitigating issues that arise during projects.  Francis stated that in mitigating issues with a project, you need to avoid the pitfall of handling problems manually (or through paper).  BMS has a steering committee to which they bring any proposed changes in the rollout strategy, and the senior leadership team at Devens does the same thing.  According to Francis, having adequate training is another good way to mitigate, but prototyping and piloting is the best overall way to mitigate risk. 

According to Tim Opitz, mitigation of risk is an issue in just about all aspects of the Dreamliner program.  The factory floor is totally paperless for the first time.  In cases where new people are brought on board and do not receive proper training, they tend to revert to their old ways, such as using paper-based reports.  Boeing made it clear what their strategic goals were with the project and made sure that people had proper education and training.  They have assigned coaches and subject matter experts to those areas to show them available tools, how to use them, and how to deal with exceptions. 

Maggi Walker was asked when and where they allow variances from their established standards.  According to Maggi, everything at Dow is ultimately driven from process safety.  One thing leadership realizes is that you need to have a management of change process in order to have a real safety culture.  Dow uses a variance process to understand what the business case is for driving change and to ensure that Dow can still deliver the same level of quality, value, safety, and standardization.  Dow also has a variance process around automation.  When they go into a project, they go through a standards value improving practice to make sure they understand global as well as local standards.  When they work with the procurement organization they do have a supplier list, but in some cases they find they have to go to suppliers they have never worked with before, either in regions they have not been in before or because the suppliers are not available to provide the services they normally do.  In these cases, Dow can get exceptions to the supplier list.  Once these suppliers get past the acceptance hurdles, they can then move onto the approved supplier list. 

Agenda

Following is the schedule for the Forum.

Monday, February 4

Tuesday, February 5

Wednesday, February 6

Thursday, February 7