2 Smart Manufacturing Ecosystem
Standards are fundamental for enabling SMS. Different standards contribute in different ways to enabling the capabilities of smart manufacturing systems. To generate an SMS landscape, we identify the standards as within scope based on whether a standard contributes to a capability, and analyze where, when, and for what purpose the standard is used. This section defines the key capabilities and presents a visualization of a smart manufacturing ecosystem. The following section presents the standards landscape for the ecosystem.
2.1 Smart Manufacturing Capabilities
Significant and positive relationships exist between manufacturing strategies and corporate competitive strategies [47]. To achieve corporate competitive goals, manufacturing systems should be developed with capabilities aligned to a firm’s competitive strategy, which usually consists of cost control and differentiation strategies of quality, delivery, innovation, service, and environmentally sustainable production. We classify key SMS-enabling capabilities into four categories including productivity, agility, quality, and sustainability (These characteristics are discussed in more detail in [14].) Table 2 shows a mapping of SMS capabilities to corporate competitive strategies.
To analyze the role of existing manufacturing standards, we summarize the key SMS capabilities as follows:
Productivity: Manufacturing productivity is defined as the ratio of production output to inputs used in the production process [89]. Productivity can be broken down further to labor productivity and material and energy efficiency. As production sizes increase, typically productivity increases; however, for SMS for which customization is a hallmark, productivity measures may need to be adjusted to be more inclusive of responsiveness to customer demand.
Agility: Agility is defined as “the capability of surviving and prospering in a competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customer-designed products and services” [7]. Critical to the success of agile manufacturing are enabling technologies such as model-based engineering, supply chain integration, and flexible production systems with distributed intelligence. Traditional metrics to measure agility include On Time Delivery to Commit, Time to Make Changeovers, Engineering Change Order Cycle Time, and Rate of New Product Introduction [8]. New measures could include Delay Due to Supply Chain Change.
Quality: Traditional quality measures reflect how well finished products meet design specifications. In addition, for SMS, quality also includes measures of product innovation and customization. Traditional quality metrics include Yield, Customer Rejects/Returns, and Material Authorizations/Returns [8]. New quality measurement indicators for innovativeness and variety/product family and options/product to measure personalization degree are needed.
Sustainability: While time and cost as measures of productivity have been the traditional drivers for manufacturing, sustainability has taken on more importance. Measurement science for manufacturing sustainability is not as mature as for time and cost and is an active area of research [18] [19]. As productivity and agility of manufacturing systems increases, the necessity for better understanding and controlling the sustainability-related impacts of those systems increases. Manufacturing sustainability is defined in terms of environmental impact (such as energy and natural resources), safety and well-being of employees, and economic viability [9].
| Corporate Competitive Strategy | SMS Key Capability | Capacbility Decomposition | Performance Metrics |
| Cost Control | Productivity | Throughput | Products being produced on a machine, line, unit, or plant over a specified period of time |
| OEE | Overall Equipment Effective - a multiplier of Avaliability * Performance * Quality | ||
| Material/Energy efficiency | Material/Energy(electricity, stream, oil, gas, etc.) required to produce a specific unit or volume of production | ||
| Labor productivity | Worker hours per unit of production | ||
| Differentiation | Agility | Response to changes | Time to Make Changeovers, Rate of New Product Instroduction, Engineering Change Order Cycle Time |
| on-Time Delivery to Commit | The percentage of time that manufacturing delivers a completed product on the schedule | ||
| Resilience to faults | Downtime in Proportion to Operating Time | ||
| Quality | Product quality | Yield, Customer Rejects/Return, and Material Authorizations/Returns | |
| Innovation | Product innovativeness | ||
| Varity | Varity/product family, Options Per Product, Personalization options | ||
| Customer Service | Customer reviews on services | ||
| Sustainability | Product | Recyclability, Energy Efficiency, Durability, Remanufacturability | |
| Process | Pimary energy use, Greenhouse gas emission | ||
| Logistics | Transportation fuel usage, Refrigeration energy usage |
2.2 Smart Manufacturing Ecosystem
The Smart Manufacturing Ecosystem encompasses a broad scope of systems in the manufacturing business including production, management, design, and engineering functions. Figure 1 illustrates three dimensions of concern that are manifest in SMS. Each dimension—product (green), production system (blue), and business (orange)—is shown within its own lifecycle. The product lifecycle is concerned with the information flows and controls beginning at the early product design stage and continuing through to the end-of-life of the product. The production system lifecycle focuses on the design, deployment, operation and decommissioning of an entire production facility including its systems. The business cycle addresses the functions of supplier and customer interactions. Each of these dimensions comes into play in the vertical integration of machines, plants, and enterprise systems in what we call the Manufacturing Pyramid (Figure 5). The integration of manufacturing software applications along each dimension helps to enable advanced controls at the shop floor and optimal decision-making at the plant and enterprise. The combination of these perspectives and the systems that support them make up the ecosystem for manufacturing software systems. Details of the lifecycle of the three dimensions, as well as the Manufacturing Pyramid, will be described in Section 3.
Historically, these dimensions have been dealt with as silos of concern. Indeed, integration along even one of these dimensions is a non-trivial challenge and is being actively worked on. We have observed that organizations that were formed to integrate single dimensions of this ecosystem are expanding in scope to address the digital thread across the dimensions (orange arrows in Figure 1). Paradigms such as continuous process improvement (CPI), flexible manufacturing (FMS), and design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) rely on information exchange between the dimensions as indicated in Figure 1. Tighter integration within and across the three dimensions will result in faster product-innovation cycles, more efficient supply chains, and more flexibility in production systems. The combination of these allows for optimal control of the automation and decision-making needed to make high quality, highly customized goods in tight synchronization with the demand for these goods [10].
Essentially, it is the seamless integrations within and across SMS dimensions and the manufacturing pyramid that lead to SMS capabilities. Table 3 shows the integration technologies highlighted in Figure 1 and the SMS capabilities supported by them.
| System | Description | Information Flow | KeyCapabilities Supported |
| PLM | production Lifycycle Management - is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from inception, through engineering descign and manufacture, to service and disposal of manufacturied products. | Bi-directal information flow through product and production system lifecycle | Quality, Agility and Sustainability |
| SCM | Supplying Chain Management - The management of upstream and downstream value-added flows of materials, final goods, and related information among suppliers, company, resellers, and final consumers. | Bi-directional information flow among supply chain stakeholders - manufacturers, customers, suppliers, and distributors | Agilities, Quality, Productivity |
| DFSCM | Design for Supply Chain Management - designing products to take advantage of and strengthen supply chain. | Bi-directional information flow between supply chain management activities and design engineers activities | Agility, Quality |
| CPI | Continuous process improvement - is the set of ongoing systems engineering and management activities used to select, tailor, implement, and assess the processes used to produce products. | Information flow from run-time manufacturing system to process designactivities | Quality, Sustainability, productivity |
| CCX | Continuous Commissioning - ongoing process of diagnosis, prognosis and performance improvement of production systems. | Bi-directional information flow between production engineering activities and production operation acitivities | Productivity, Agility, Quality, and Sustainability |
| DFMA | Design for Manufactring and Assembly - the design for ease of manufacture of the design of product for ease of assembly. | Information flow from production engineering activities, operation activities to production design activities | Productivity, Agility |
| FMS/RMS | Flexible Manufacturing System/Reconfigurable Manufacturing system - machines are flexiable and can be configured to produce changed volume or new product types with or without changed process. | Information flow from product engineering activities to production engineering activities | Agility |
| Manufacturing Pyramid | The hierarchical nature of existing manufaturing systems illustrated by a three-level pyramid including ERP, MOM and shop floor. | Bi-directional information flow among ERP, MOM activities and control system | Productivity, Agility, Quality, Sustainability |
| Fast Innovation Cycle | To improve New Product Introduction(NPI) Cycle by anticipating trends through gathering data from product usage and feeding it back into product ideation | Information flow from product use to product design | Quality, Agility |
2.3 Impacts of Standards
Standards are fundamental and valuable tools that can enable the adoption of technologies and innovations by business owners. Accordingly, they contribute to one or more SMS key capabilities. For example, on the product dimension, PLM standards contribute to both agility (by streamlining processes) and quality (by enabling the integration of different activities along the product and production system lifecycles). In the production system area, continuous commissioning (CCX) standards can improve machine performance and systems reliability to improve productivity, quality, and sustainability (through improved energy performance). Standards for electronic commerce such as the Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) help streamline business processes between partners in the supply chain. The next section presents a landscape of manufacturing standards on top of the SMS ecosystem where we see clearly existing manufacturing standards and how they can enhance SMS capabilities, if adopted.