Industrial Transformation Blog

In the first post of this series, which was written on Apriso's Manufacturing Transformation Blog, I described a common problem many manufacturing companies face today, the lack of a robust IT platform for orchestrating end-to-end business processes. As was shown in my real world example, many companies have some maturity in areas like ERP or PLM, but this does not necessarily extend across the entire value chain. In fact, there are often major gaps in manufacturing, quality, distribution, sales, and service.

One of the blogs I frequently read and occasionally guest post on is Apriso's Manufacturing Transformation Blog. Chris Will, Chief Technology Officer at Apriso, recently posted an article on the ownership of product traceability in the supply chain. I've known Chris for many years and, over much of that time, I have been working closely with him on technology strategies for product traceability.

What’s interesting about the current manufacturing environment is the increased weight that executives are putting on collaboration. Not to say that group efforts weren’t a focal point in the past, but it’s being leveraged quite differently today. While developing information and processes has always been important, it wasn’t until the convergence of IT and manufacturing software that market leading organizations began taking it to the next level. A perfect example: Enterprise Bill of Process (eBOP).