Business process management (BPM) in manufacturing is a fast growing way to support information driven tasks that form the base of your production events. Manufacturing enterprises have seen a substantial use of business process management applications but most have been in the area of administrative functions such as warranty management or ERP extensions. Very few instances of BPM have been used in the production environment but this is changing as newer ideas in the use of manufacturing and supply chain information emerge. The driving force behind this new perspective is the improved ability to connect information from disparate plant floor and enterprise application silos into a manufacturing process as a unit of automation and, in many cases, without programming.
BPM in manufacturing is the opposite of the typical application silo data-centric thinking. Instead of installing a typical plant application like MES, think instead of how you would like the process to function and which data elements are necessary to satisfy the business objective. One process might be to deliver work instructions to a workstation as a series of steps in a production process. Other processes could include dashboards to monitor and display production activity progress and gather operational metrics. Other ideas might be to route and display engineering change orders or confirm regulatory compliance at a workstation. Production process management provides many advantages over installing yet another application. In this new environment you define, model and deploy a process that addresses your specific needs and is deployed exactly to fit your requirements. This approach will be easier, faster and less costly. See more in our whitepapers.