I.T. is a unique department within a manufacturing company. This department can assist in answering some of the most basic business questions from the top of an organization to the shop floor. In a company with adequate I.T. resources, I.T. should be able to assist in answering questions like…
What’s my capacity?
Are we profitable?
What are my customer needs?
What’s the cost?
What are my critical issues?
What are my yields?
What’s my production schedule?
How’s my shift producing?
Where’s my material?
The potential for relevant, accurate and timely answers to many business questions is often overlooked. The fact that I.T. has a global view of the entire company to answer these questions, should make I.T. an essential part of the business unit, as opposed to the necessary ’support only’ department of days past.
So how does I.T. assist their company in answering some of their most important questions?
Obviously, the more data the organization collects and is made available, the better. If you’re lucky enough to be in an organization that has production, accounting, and HR databases, it will be just a matter of good planning to ensure data entregrity and having the reporting skills and tools available. For the purposes of the following paragraphs, let’s assume we have these databases available to us.
Let’s start with “What’s my capacity?”. First, lets define capacity: the facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy. : capability <a plan to double the factory’s capacity>; also : maximum output <industries running at three-quarter capacity>.
Let’s also assume our production database is collecting statistics from the processes in the routing of a widget. This means I have data available to the organization such as, widgets produced, scrap produced, time taken to produce the widgets, people resources need to produce the widgets, machine resources needed to produce the widgets, how much material I consumed to produce the widgets, etc. After some time to collect history, a company should be able to use this kind of data to derive real capacities and capabilities that would be of use to Materials Management, Sales, Product Development, Operations, etc.
Also, how does I.T. assist in answering questions like “Are we profitable?” or “What’s the actual cost of the widget?” Let’s define profit and cost. Proifit: the excess of the selling price of goods over their cost; Cost:the outlay or expenditure (as of effort or sacrifice) made to achieve an object .
We can merge our production data, purchasing and inventory data, and human resources data in a fashion that with give the organization a view of the true costs of those widgets, thus giving us the ability, when merged with accounting data, to see our true profits. Maybe we even see that doing business with a particular customer is actually costing the organization money. We could see that producing a particular widget is more profitable, and that may influence how we diversify the different markets we are involved in pursuing.
With the right infrastructure in place, the data is available to answer all the above questions. Today, I.T.’s role should be to have the business understanding that brings it all together in a way that gives their company a competitive advantage and is relevant to their organization. I think there are many I.T. professionals that already recognize this and are ready to participate as a business professional in their company, if they aren’t already. It would stand to reason, as I.T. professionals have a very unique view of their company that is global in nature and scope. They see the business as a whole not departmently. This is what enables them to put the pieces together in a way that benefits the company as a whole.
Wade Stankich
Information Technology Manager
