Overview

New technologies are revolutionising the way manufacturing and supply chain management are implemented. These changes are delivering manufacturing firms the competitive advantage of a highly flexible and responsive supply chain and manufacturing system to ensure that they meet the high expectations of their customers, who, in today's economy, demand absolutely the best service, price, delivery time and product quality. To make e-manufacturing and supply chain technologies effective, integration is needed between various, often disparate systems. To understand why this is such an issue, one needs to understand what the different systems or system components do, their objectives, their specific focus areas and how they interact with other systems. It is also required to understand how these systems evolved to their current state, as the concepts used during the early development of systems and technology tend to remain in place throughout the life-cycle of the systems/technology. This book explores various standards, concepts and techniques used over the years to model systems and hierarchies in order to understand where they fit into the organization and supply chain. It looks at the specific system components and the ways in which they can be designed and graphically depicted for easy understanding by both information technology (IT) and non-IT personnel. Without a good implementation philosophy, very few systems add any real benefit to an organization, and for this reason the ways in which systems are implemented and installation projects managed are also explored and recommendations are made as to possible methods that have proven successful in the past. The human factor and how that impacts on system success are also addressed, as is the motivation for system investment and subsequent benefit measurement processes. Finally, the vendor/user supply/demand within the e-manufacturing domain is explored and a method is put forward that enables the reduction of vendor bias during the vendor selection process. The objective of this book is to provide the reader with a good understanding regarding the four critical factors (business/physical processes, systems supporting the processes, company personnel and company/personal performance measures) that influence the success of any e-manufacturing implementation, and the synchronization required between these factors.

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Gerhard Greeff is an engineer with qualifications in Chemical engineering, production management and quality management and control. He has worked in various industries, including chemical and petrochemical, paper and pulp, mining, metals and pharmaceutical manufacture.His working career includes periods working as a plant supervisor, foreman and manager, quality manager, safety, health and environmental manager, change implementer and business consultant. He is currently employed as Divisional Manager: Consulting at Altech Informatics (Pty) Ltd, and is in charge of a group of consultants responsible for the design of manufacturing management software solutions, including SCADA, MES, SCM and others.Gerhard has published various papers and articles related to production management, safety, health, environment and quality, as well as the implementation of change, software solution design and MES.Gerhard fervently believes that software solutions should only be implemented to drive behavior, support business and physical processes, and to assist the company in achieving more value from these processes, not for any other reason. He believes that most of the concepts, tools and solutions explored in this book can be coordinated, synchronized and can add tremendous value to any manufacturer. He feels that the extent to which a company exploits their IT investment in this domain is only limited by economic factors and the individuals' imagination. Ranjan is the factory manager for a large FMCG company specialising in the edible oil business. He reports directly to the managing director and has responsibility for manufacturing, quality assurance, packing and distribution, accounts and human resources. He has spent a considerable amount of time studying supply chain and e-manufacturing issues and presenting papers in these topic areas as a result of the upgrading of his plant and processes. He has an especial interest in tying the real time information derived from the factory and production environment to the business systems in a company.

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