Impact of Manufacturing Practices on Adoption of Plant Information Systems

Firms have invested over $15 billion in the past three years on new information technology and software in their manufacturing plants. In this study, we document how the implementation of new types of manufacturing practices has impacted the types of information technology investments in manufacturing plants. We present a conceptual model to develop hypotheses about relationships between manufacturing practices and the choice of information systems at the plant level. Analysis of cross-sectional survey data from 932 manufacturing plants provides strong empirical support for our hypotheses about how manufacturing practices influence decisions regarding adoption of plant-level IT applications

Architecture for analyzing manufacturing execution data - using Business Intelligence logic

To compete in global markets, companies today require more structured data in faster cycles to support their strategic and operational decisions. To meet these requirements enterprise resource planning (ERP)-software providers integrate more and more analytical operations as well as reporting functions into their systems. But while ERP-Software is focusing on corporate management, there are plenty of other not integrated systems throughout the organization which e.g. control the human-machine interaction or run the value adding processes of the organization. Hence, there are shortcomings in the structuring and the analysis of the data on the shop floor level since the ERP and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are still very heterogeneous and often not very well integrated. Our design science-oriented case study on a Business Intelligence (BI) implementation on the shop floor level addresses these problems. Our approach moves away from the classic reporting functions of the shop floor to ERP but rather suggests evaluating the shop floor data in real-time in order to control the production process. This case study identifies more generalized issues which can potentially be applied to other situational and organizational contexts