SIMATIC IT Value Proposition

The continuous pressure in manufacturing requires companies to change their structure and move to a more agile supply chain management. To fulfill the market demand, still keeping necessary margins and continuously growing quality benchmarks, the capacity is required to reconfigure on-line the supply chain, still orchestrating all the operations in the plant and keeping the right visibility. The right synchronization originates from the collaboration of all the IT levels and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) is a key actor in this play, as it owns the manufacturing workflows where decisions mostly affect profitability.

Today the pressure for manufacturers is coming from different factors and in particular the increased competition, the shorter product lifecycle and the increasing demands of regulatory bodies. This naturally impacts on every aspect of a company, in every business process, including production operations that represent the activity at the plant level. From this perspective production operations are not only a way of linking shop floor with business level, but become an integral part of the entire corporate business processes.

Therefore in the continuously growing complexity of manufacturing environment, MES is no longer only providing systemization of best practice but has to guarantee seamless collaboration with the Supply Chain, with positive ROI (Return on Investment) and low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

Originally the goal of the plant activities was to fulfill specific targets with a positive and quick ROI without any involvement with the corporate level. This causes solutions at the plant level to grow complex, with no integration and limited standardization. Today this segregation is no longer possible. Plant IT solutions, basically MES in a wider and more comprehensive scope, must coordinate and synchronize all the activities related to production. But this is not enough. Plant IT must become a real and efficient element of the Supply Chain.

Collaborating with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), Sales, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), SCM (Supply Chain Management), Finance, Maintenance, Logistic, QA (Quality Assurance) and all the other actors that provide functions to fulfill the corporate business processes. Strategies like make-to-order require tight cooperation between different processes and the outcome is that since every individual functionality has to efficiently cooperate, the technology infrastructure can no longer defined independently from plant and enterprise, but a strong synergy is required.

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