Less Oil, Cleaner Oil

la to a produced item by facility. This provides the needed flexibility for batch manufacturers.”

Yield analysis is another area of concern for batch processors, Childress says. “Many larger ERP systems are built for a model that uses repetitive assembly called discrete processing. You make the same item the same way every time. In discrete manufacturing, when you start back-flushing, the software says, ‘You made 100 of these products. That means you must have used a fixed amount of the components.’ It is all very fixed and organized. But that doesn’t work in our world of batch process manufacturing,” she says. “What will happen is that your raw material and inventory control will get out of whack because the bill of materials said you used 100 components, but you actually used 120 or 90. All of a sudden, that back-flush takes that variable yield and pushes it into inventory. Now, before you know it, you don’t know what materials you have, and you don’t know why. That linkage between what was supposed to be used and what was actually used can be really significant depending on the industry.”

Scheduling, according to Childress, is probably the No. 1 feature or technology that a manufacturer that grows from small/medium to a larger-sized organization needs. “While lot traceability is in place no matter the size, scheduling is not usually added until more growth is recognized,” she says.

Analytics of the quality and operational data also tends to come later on the growth journey, when companies can turn from their day-to-day operations to look more to process optimization. The ability to share data across multiple sources has become a priority. “The sharing of information across many sources of data—whether control systems, supplier or customer operations, or barcode data collection—has become essential,” Childress says. “The ability to receive information from one system, send it to yours, and then hand it back and connect the pieces together throughout the manufacturing process is big. This is already happening, but will happen at a much faster pace as the software providers (and even hardware providers) come together under common frameworks to increase the number of ways to communicate with each other.“

MICHAEL COSTA | SENIOR EDITOR