Manufacturing Digital Nervous System, 1998 Process & Product Quality Conference Proceedings

Manufacturers have made massive investments in information technology (IT) over the past twenty-five years, but overall productivity has been flat. Where is the payoff? What has gone wrong? A large number of specialized applications with rich functionality are now available offering all-new business capabilities, but most operate within a relatively narrow space of the manufacturing enterprise and supply chain. Best-of-breed application selection and deployment approaches, with little thought regarding the underlying IT architecture, have constrained the realized value of IT.

Despite all this investment, information integration within and between enterprises remains the single biggest issue in manufacturing. This integration is the key to unlocking the true unrealized potential of IT in manufacturing organizations. Only when a manufacturer develops the capability to instantaneously receive and transmit information “signals” within and outside of its enterprise – a Digital Nervous System (DNS) – will its IT investment begin to pay off. A complete Manufacturing DNS (MDNS) is comprised of performance measures, operational data, integrated line-of-business applications, and information technology infrastructure.