With all the ups and downs in today's economy, it's nice to hear some good news: the United States' manufacturing productivity is way up, over 17 percent since 1990.
Many factors are responsible for this increase, but a major component is U.S. manufacturers' ability to respond quickly to market conditions with accelerated product time-to-market. This acceleration, in turn, is based in large part on both reducing manufacturing time on the plant floor and streamlining the entire supply and distribution chain.
On March 15, the National Information Infrastructure Testbed (NIIT) announced an Enhanced Product Realization Project (EPRP). The NIIT, located in Denver, is a consortium of manufacturing corporations, aerospace and defense contractors, information technology providers and national laboratories focused on building applications for the national infrastructure or "information superhighway."
The EPRP involves creating for study a virtual, online model of the manufacturing and supply processes of Caterpillar, Inc., a global manufacturer of earth-moving equipment. In addition to Caterpillar, a number of other NIIT members are participating in the project, including 3M, Bay Networks, Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett-Packard, Hughes Electronics, the Institute for Defense Analysis, Sprint, Texas Instruments, and the national laboratories of Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia.
"The first phase of the project is focused on the Internet," says Troy Eid, executive director of the NIIT. "We'll be studying ways to develop a sophisticated and secure environment for the use of collaborative tools." To replicate Caterpillar's manufacturing environment, World Wide Web servers will be set up at the company's manufacturing sites as well as at Sandia Labs and Hughes Electronics. Since 3M is a Caterpillar supplier and Texas Instruments is a dealer, these members will also set up servers to help replicate Caterpillar's wide-area manufacturing and supply chain environments. Eid says that during the project, team members will be testing different authentication layers, audit trails, user IDs, virus detectors and data encryption schemes.
During the second phase (scheduled after Sept. 15), more sophisticated applications will be integrated to further replicate transactions among manufacturing, supplier and dealer sites, using network technology such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Overall, the project will attempt to develop scalable and integrated information infrastructure models across multiple platforms to support realtime collaboration for electronic project scheduling, videoconferencing, computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and other computer-integrated manufacturing functions.
Ideally, the EPRP will provide Caterpillar and NIIT members with valuable information about complete interoperability across both wired and nonwired networks, as well as secure access to multiple sites and applications. The NIIT will also investigate how the information superhighway can help manufacturers create more efficient workflows so workflow data can be "looped back" to improve the design and production process.
"This project is more than just a demonstration," stresses Eid. "This is an 18-month project that will replicate as accurately as possible the world that [Caterpillar and its business partners] will do business in. That way we can see where the holes are with our strategies and fix them before investing in a complete infrastructure."