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06.01.10 The Continuum Of Manufacturing Models  By
Charles Betz
So, I just finished Steve Bell's excellent Lean Enterprise Systems... a book that has already contributed to one insight, that of the CMDB as a Bill of Materials or Resources. Another well written section was that covering the continuum of manufacturing models. While this breakdown is industry standard (appearing also in Vollman's Manufacturing Planning & Control Systems for Supply Chain Management, the official APICS text), Bell's discussion is concise and effective, and got me thinking more about how to apply the concepts to transactional IT considered as the "shop floor." The major continuum is: • Make to Stock • Assemble to Order • Make to Order • Engineer to Order in order proceeding from higher volume, more standardized products, to lower volume and one of a kind products. However, I think that there is a missing one: Make as Service. (I know, how dare I propose an extension to APICS standard terms!) If we accept that part of the basic definition of service is that it is simultaneous, we have a class of activity where the product is assembled in real time based on customer pull. If the product is information, we have an IT service, providing transactional information in real time.This allows us to see transactional IT systems as part of the same continuum. The two ends of the spectrum then become: • Engineer to Order • Make as Service Here is an interesting conjecture: any high volume, deterministic Make to Stock or Make as Service processes are themselves the product of one or more Engineer to Order (ETO) processes. In fact, is not product development in general a form of an Engineer to Order process? Think not about producing the product, but rather producing its assembly line. Certainly, as I look at Bell's characterization of ETO: "Complex presales design and engineering... unique design may require a large and complex multilevel BOM using many unique and often custom-built parts that have never before been purchased or manufactured. In many ETO environments, a permanent finished part record is not created... rather, a job or a project record is created... often scheduled as a multiphase project rather than a single process flow..." I am struck by its similarity to large IT projects. Hence the fundamental point of this post: The large scale enterprise IT organization is fundamentally an Engineer to Order concern. What is interesting is looking at the practices of industrial ETO shops in general (the non-IT kind, like engineering firms). Per Bell, there is a degree of rigor and consistency not typically found in the large IT organization, where development practices may vary wildly from group to group and even the most basic forms of record keeping non-existent. The question: Continue reading this article. About the Author: Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog. |
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