Let’s face it, there’s a lot of noise out there about adapting to the global economy. But some very convincing news and research has surfaced that indicates a rising number of manufacturers will look to align their corporate IT and manufacturing systems in order to properly “go global,” as they say.

Who’s they? Well, for starters, there’s Panasonic, which is in the midst of a massive global effort to reconcile its product information. CIO Insight has a good case study on the whole situation. In a nutshell: Panasonic wants to eliminate numerous, duplicative and incomplete records stored in multiple repositories across the enterprise, in remote and isolated information islands. The end goal is to improve time-to-market and enable simultaneous, global product launches. The only way to get this done is to align corporate IT with manufacturing systems.

Maybe Panasonic read JP Morgan’s Global Report on Manufacturing. Here’s a snippet that’ll surely get the global integration juices flowing:

Growth of global manufacturing production reached a 21-month peak in April. New orders also rose sharply and employment increased at the most marked pace for almost two years. A slight increase in pre-production inventories was recorded for the first time in thirteen months. Suppliers’ delivery times deteriorated to the greatest extent for almost one-and- a-half years, with the US (most marked in six months), Eurozone (sharpest since June 2004), Japan, China and the UK all reporting supply-side disruption.

To be sure, there’s a lot of good news in the JP Morgan report.

However, there’s also some bad news, particularly around the “suppliers’ delivery times deteriorated…” part. High fuel costs and other kinds of malarkey are partly to blame, but we hope, at this point, manufacturers have a pretty good handle on what to expect as it relates to transportation and distribution. [Ed. Note: If not, check out next week's issue of our IMT e-newsletter, which will focus on such things as transportation and shipping and the like.]

Poor delivery times in today’s global economy are unacceptable, which is why standardization is so important. A new AberdeenGroup report underscores this point nicely. The report found that 85 percent of best-in-class manufacturers (versus 52 percent of their poorer-performing counterparts) are executing on global strategies to unify processes and drive performance programs across the enterprise by:

• Standardizing KPIs across plants/factories (78 percent);
• Publishing technology infrastructure guidelines (74 percent); and
• Normalizing reporting across plants/factories (70 percent).

“It is interesting to note that leading companies are taking a broader view of MES (manufacturing execution systems) investments. Traditionally seen as a single project, best-in-class manufacturers are enrolling corporate IT to help establish a broader set of requirements for plants and factories” said Jane Biddle, vice president Global Manufacturing Research of Aberdeen, author of the report. “Global manufacturing-IT teams are taking a broader and longer term view of manufacturing requirements in the plants and across the network. This combined focus on process improvement and standardization at all levels of the company will lead to ongoing performance improvements.”

Aberdeen’s “Global Manufacturing: MES and Beyond” benchmark study (officially titled “The Lean Benchmark Report: Closing the Reality Gap”) highlighted that these global enterprise strategies also are supported by manufacturing with initiatives that include the following:

• Standardizing plant and factory applications and control systems;
• Building flexibility into manufacturing and supply chain processes; and
• Integrating systems into common factory floor information framework.

Is your firm deploying a best-in-class strategy to compete in the global economy?