Top floor/shop floor: a temporal disconnect

At the business Planning Level, often referred to as "the top floor," execs live in a world measured by years, quarters, months, and weeks. That's what "time" means to them. Such is not the case as you move down a level or two, and it's certainly not the case down at the Factory Floor Automation level, known as "the shop floor." At that level, engineers, mechanics, and operators measure things down to the millisecond. This has led inevitably to a fundamental disconnect within the enterprise, as Chappell pointed out in his PAF remarks. "It's why we've had to have different [controls and automation] systems at the different levels," said Chappell, who is chariman of the Make2Pack initiative, a joint effort of WBF and the OMAC Packaging Workgroup aimed at establishing standards that all stakeholders in the manufacturing arena can endorse.

Fortunately, Chappell told his PAF audience, help is on the way. A number of organizations are seeking ways to exchange data so seamlessly that this temporal disconnect separating an enterprise's various levels can be overcome. B2MML and Make2Pack are two examples.

"B2MML stands for Business to Manufacturing Markup Language," said Chappell. "It involves a lot of work going on from many different organizations that are defining how ERP is going to interact with MES. At the same time, those of us active in Make2Pack are dealing with the lower level of automation, and we're working very closely with the B2MML people to make sure that when the data flows, it has a conduit all the way down to the instruments and the automation that has to exist at that level. The ultimate goal for all these efforts is to move business data to drive manufacturing directly. Incredible benefits are potentially possible with this."

For more on Make2Pack, contact Chappell at [email protected].