Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The reinvention of air travel I've been reading Jon Udell for many years. He now hosts a podcast "Interviews with Innovators" on IT Conversations. Here is a blog post about his latest--an innovator in aviation who is working on a sort of air taxi idea where people can go to a Web site and put in local airports (regional, not major) and times and destinations. The analytics behind the Web site can aggregate and suggest ways to get several people together and avoid the long drives, hubs and crowds to get where you're going better. Check it out here. 4:13:41 PM    comment []

MESA Charts New Path I'm in Orlando at the MESA International conference (actually, I've been there and now I'm at the airport getting ready to go home). While here, I escaped over to the Atlantic coast to see my new grandson, Wyatt. He is 10 weeks and has grown much since I saw him four weeks ago. I took his mother and him to dinner last night (my son is in training) and she took him outside for a few minutes when he got fussy. It's good for the ego (I guess) when the older people looked at me and smiled and told me that I'd get used to it. I told them I got used to it 32 years ago when the kid's dad cried worse than that. ;-} The main keynote yesterday was given by author Peter Fingar. He really challenged me to look deeper at business process optimization and make sure I organize Automation World to probe the issues and report best practices. Today's program featured two CIO panels--one was suppliers (GE Fanuc, Rockwell Automation, and Siemens Energy & Automation CIOs) and one was "users" (Eastman Chemicals, Sara Lee and Navistar). Interesting observations--they all advocate laying out a roadmap, using standards and off the shelf applications as much as possible, and reducing the number of applications. None knew what ISA95 is. All have recently endured long ERP implementations. Here's the "real" news from the conference: The Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association International (MESA) unveiled new initiatives designed to attract end user members as well as a new metrics study at its annual meeting in Orlando. As the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association International (MESA) seeks to grow from a vendor association to a broadly based association of technology suppliers, solution providers and industry professionals in manufacturing companies, it has added a new tier of membership and member benefits. Basic membership is now free. It allows members to download one white paper, upload whitepapers for certification and post job opportunities. Manufacturer basic members can be listed in the Website's member list, and all basic members will receive association newsletters and may serve on operating committees. Premium members enjoy unlimited access to white papers, case studies and Web presentations, and receive discounted registration and discounted exhibition space at MESA's conference. They also receive access to MESA's exclusive Metrics Guidebook & Framework. The association has launched a Web site designed to be a better service to members as well as visitors. It is also undertaking the development of Strategic Initiative Guidebooks designed to be something of a best-practices guide for manufacturing execution systems (MES) users. It also updated its model of collaborative manufacturing execution systems by defining connectors to strategic initiatives. MESA defines some of these initiatives as Lean Manufacturing, quality and regulatory compliance, product lifecycle management, among others. The association once again partnered with analyst firm Industry Directions for a survey on metrics and their use. In an overview of the study, Industry Directions principal Julie Fraser reported that most manufacturers are actively pursuing Lean (73 percent) and Total Quality (64 percent) initiatives. In addition 47 percent are working on a Real-time Enterprise initiative. Only three specific practices are widely used by over half of the manufacturers claiming to pursue those initiatives. These are 5S workplace organization and standardized work or methods sheets from Lean, corrective and preventative action from Total Quality and Kaizen from both Lean and Total Quality. The study discovered that most manufacturers use homegrown electronic solutions built with such applications as Microsoft Excel. For more information on the study, check with a MESA member. 3:49:43 PM    comment []