“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If this proverb were applied in today’s operations, every organization would be in a reactive mode of maintenance and work against the lean manufacturing concepts.

Any breakdown or downtime on the manufacturing floor, in the warehouse, in transportation, or any other business process will create missed customer commitments, failed deliveries, idle time, and lost labor hours. Instead of taking the risk and being in reactive mode, wouldn’t it be nice to have systems or procedures through which an organization can know the status of its equipment? In today’s fast-paced market environment it’s beneficial for organizations to know which equipment needs preventative or scheduled maintenance for better planning, commitment, and allocation of resources. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2009 APICS International Conference and Expo is starting next week in Toronto (Canada). One of the educational tracks is focusing on how to manage inventory in a changing economy. As inventory is a challenging issue for all types of manufacturing organizations, regardless of industry. If an organization can manage its inventory without losing focus on demand and where its dollars are being spent, it may achieve its inventory objectives. Gary Gossard (president of IQR International) gave a preview presentation in a webinar in which he pointed out a technique that can be used by organizations to manage inventory and reduce waste during changing economic times. Read the rest of this entry »

In the forthcoming 2009 APICS International Conference and Expo, many educational tracks will be covered by industry leaders, and lean is one of them. Since we are in a global economic crisis where every manufacturer, supplier, and producer is trying to reduce cost and minimize waste while increasing production or throughput, I am particularly interested in the “lean” educational track to hear what the experts are saying. Recently, I had the privilege of attending the preview of “Lean for Materials Managers” by Bill Kerber, President of High Mix Lean. Read the rest of this entry »

I listened to a webinar organized by The Association for Operations Management (APICS) for their upcoming International Conference and Expo,which will be hosted in Toronto, Ontario (Canada) from October 4th to 6th 2009. This is the first webcast in the series, and its title really got my attention: “Time Management and Master Scheduling: Built from the Same Cloth.” The speaker for this webcast was Donald H. Sheldon, the president of DH Sheldon & Associates. He described in this particular webcast the importance of time management within master scheduling. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, many assets are designed and manufactured with the help of product lifecycle management (PLM) tools and systems, which contain highly valuable product definition information for enterprise asset management (EAM) and computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) operations.

That being said, if there is a way to tie the two systems (EAM and PLM) together, the result will be beneficial to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), asset owners, and third-party maintenance service providers. However, this isn’t an easy job. The following are a few barriers between EAM and PLM as I see it. Read the rest of this entry »

When I speak with distribution executives nowadays, they all say the same thing: “We are struggling to keep our heads above water because of the economy.” However, before the economy took a turn for the worse, they talked about low profit margins, high inventory levels with low turns, and an erosion of their profitability because of their warehouses. I am often forced to ask, “Is the economy really that bad? Or, is your inability to deliver what your customers want, when they want it, and at a competitive price making it seem worse to your organization?”

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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or similar IT packages have become widely used in businesses of all sizes and types. From my understanding, small and family businesses or companies are the only ones yet to join the mainstream trend of implementing ERP software, although the vast majority of medium and lower-medium-sized companies have already performed an implementation at least once (some of them twice or even more often). But I thought it might be interesting anyway to see how my personal experience and the conclusions I have drawn for myself correlate to implementation issues and business practices in different regions and sizes of businesses. I placed the 5 categories of problems in ascending order based on the degree of “entanglement.”
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Recently there were two great articles published on our Website touching the interesting problem of interactions between traditional manufacturing management and project management: The Business Model for the 21st Century Is Project-centric and Weather the Recession with Project ERP. I agree with the respective authors that the project-driven management approach can help companies improve their businesses in any kind of economic situation, whether during a recession or a booming economy. But in this blog post I would like to share some thoughts with you on other aspects of how project management can help manufacturing. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series explained IQMS’ upbeat posture despite a hostile and depressed environment, while Part 2 analyzed the recent developments of EnterpriseIQ [evaluate this product], the flagship offering of IQMS. This final part will focus on IQMS’ most recent involvement in the user experience (UX) design developments. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series explained IQMS’ ebullience and growth despite a hostile and depressed environment, especially in manufacturing. IQMS attributes its continued success to its strategy of being the single source for virtually everything a target customer might need, including software development, sales and implementation services, training, and customer service and technical support.

Before delving into the flagship suite’s comprehensive functional footprint, it might be important to describe EnterpriseIQ’s [evaluate this product] technical foundation and performance, which IQMS touts as important parts of its value proposition. Read the rest of this entry »

Some time in mid-2005 TEC published a six part article on IQMS, a relatively small and obscure enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor based in Paso Robles, California (US), with offices across North America (i.e., in Chicago, Canada, and Mexico), Europe (i.e., Sweden and with recently announced indirect presence in the UK) and Asia (i.e., China and Taiwan). Some readers were likely wondering why I “made so much mileage” out of a seemingly unimportant vendor of fewer than 70 employees and with only a few hundred customers at the time.

Well, I might have been somewhat vindicated in early 2009, when IQMS announced that it closed 2008 with double-digit profitability and a 10 percent increase in new customer accounts. Even as manufacturing markets have tightened and  doom-and-gloom sentiments have pervaded the globe, IQMS has accumulated revenue gains for several years. Namely, in 2005 and 2006, the company grew by about 25 percent each year (which was a multiple of the industry’s average growth), demonstrating its value proposition to selected manufacturing industries worldwide, including medical devices, automotive, aerospace, plastics, and consumer packaged goods (e.g., appliances, electronics, computers/business machines). Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series introduced the concept of complex event processing (CEP) and possible needs for CEP software applications. One such broad CEP platform, Progress Apama, has been offered by Progress Software Coporation after acquiring the formerly independent Apama LTD in 2005. It is worth analyzing what has happened with the Apama product since being acquired by Progress Software. Read the rest of this entry »

The role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in society cannot be underestimated—indeed, many think SMEs are the most important sector of a nation’s economy due to their  creative and innovative abilities, as well as the flexibility they execute in order to survive in our competitive world.  Yet, as editor Ruth Hillary explains in the collection of essays in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and the Environment, their day-to-day activities aren’t always positive. Read the rest of this entry »

In the two previous blog posts (What Does the “P” in PLM Really Mean? and What Does the “L” in PLM Really Mean?) I discussed the object being managed within the product lifecycle management (PLM) methodology. Now, it is the time to move on to the last word—“management.” Management is such a general term nowadays, that simply looking at it won’t give you much idea of what it is about in the PLM context. If your organization is looking for a PLM solution, investigating the functionality that various PLM solutions can provide will help you better understand what a PLM system should be handling. However, I’d suggest establishing some high-level ideas about what a PLM system should be able to manage before you are overwhelmed by the functionality flood. Read the rest of this entry »

“Clearly there will be winners and losers in the transition to a low-carbon economy, and investors should be concerned about companies who are not able to provide the information they require.” – Carbon Disclosure Project Global 500 Report 2008 (also known as CDP6)

To today’s enterprises, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission—amongst various sustainability issues—is one of the highest priorities. Some companies, as I have seen, have set up strategies to address GHG emission issues. At the operational level, companies are modifying accounting systems to report GHG emissions and to accommodate carbon trading; implementing energy management systems to reduce energy consumption; and optimizing supply chain management systems to increase transportation efficiency— to name just a few approaches. Read the rest of this entry »