• Active or completed projects: 11
• Estimated ATP funding: $ 57.2 M
• Industry cost-share funding: $ 52.6 M

Potential for U.S. Economic Benefit. Companies in many manufacturing industries face the challenge of responding rapidly to changing markets and evolving business opportunities. Today, the speed with which new products are developed and delivered to market often determines competitive success. But even highly automated plants and factories face significant obstacles in adapting or reconfiguring production operations to accommodate design changes and new product lines. Peculiarities in manufacturing software and incompatibilities among software applications, which necessitate customized systems integration efforts, often are the primary sources of costly delays.

The overall technical goal of the ATP focused program on Technologies for the Integration of Manufacturing Applications (TIMA) is to develop and demonstrate the technologies needed to create affordable, integrable manufacturing systems—those that can be rapidly integrated and reconfigured and, in the long run, that can automatically adjust their performance in response to changing conditions and requirements. If successful, TIMA will enable greater speed and agility among U.S. companies in all manufacturing sectors. Technical work carried out under the program will facilitate industry-led efforts to create a real-time, "plug and play" manufacturing software environment.

Discrete and continuous process manufacturing include some of the largest industries in the United States, such as electronics, aerospace, automotive, and chemical. Discrete manufacturing alone represented over $1 trillion in sales and accounted for well over one-third of all manufacturing jobs in 1991. Since this focused program also will impact operations within the process industries, the government investment could be leveraged into savings totaling in the billions.

The TIMA technologies will benefit companies across a range of industries—companies that already employ manufacturing execution systems (by providing them with a wider range of powerful, integrable applications that will dramatically improve the manufacturers’ability to reconfigure, scale, and adapt their processes); small and medium-sized manufacturers (by making MES more affordable and by providing a direct path toward greater automation through incremental additions of new, easily integrated applications and capabilities); and vendors of MES products (by expanding the market, lowering barriers to entry, and providing incentives for innovation and technical specialization, since new products and services can be marketed to a broader range of potential customers).

U.S. workers will benefit from increased manufacturing productivity, which strengthens the competitive positions of companies and industries and enhances their prospects for long-term survival.

Technology Challenge. A common and significant impediment to the timely flow of information within and between enterprises is the costly, massive effort required to implement and integrate information systems that share real-time manufacturing data throughout organizations. Typically, factory-floor information systems communicate neither directly nor regularly with front-office information systems dedicated to accounting, forecasting, and other resource planning activities, or with design and engineering systems. As a result, upstream information systems are unaware of important manufacturing details, such as the availability of appropriate tools, labor, and materials; maintenance schedules; records of past process performance; or the status of work in progress. Middle-level information systems bridge this critical information gap between upstream and downstream activities. Today’s MES solutions, however, are burdened by complexities that make them difficult to implement and integrate and, often, even more difficult to modify and upgrade.

Only a small fraction of manufacturing businesses can afford the cost of installing and maintaining an integrated MES solution, estimated to run between $400,000 and $1 million. The sizable costs incurred for maintenance and systems integration work required to upgrade or otherwise change the system place MES further out of the reach of smaller manufacturers. Consequently, only larger manufacturers with average annual revenues on the order of $50 million or more are currently adopting integrated MES solutions.

Across manufacturing industries, adoption of MES has been slight and uneven. Large companies in industries with substantial regulatory and reporting requirements, such as the pharmaceutical, aircraft, and defense industries, are the most common users of MES, followed by semiconductor manufacturers, which manage complex, hard-to-control production and assembly processes.

The small number of businesses that have invested in such systems have followed three approaches—proprietary, in-house solutions; point solutions fashioned from commercially available, individual applications that are then custom-integrated with common database and messaging systems; or commercially available, integrated MES solutions that generally require customization for specific needs or to implement new applications and capabilities.

All three approaches are inflexible to change and cannot be integrated seamlessly into the enterprise—major deficiencies in a rapidly changing competitive environment and during a period of accelerating innovation in technology and in manufacturing and management strategies.

The ATP TIMA program aims at a fourth approach—integrable MES—that achieves the benefits of the three existing approaches while enabling important new benefits. Like point solutions, an integrable MES can be assembled piece-wise from reusable components. And like proprietary solutions and commercially available suites of applications, integrable MES is intended to provide comprehensive, system-wide surveillance and reporting. But unlike existing approaches, integrable MES will be more comprehensive, and it is expected to accommodate rapid customization, incremental installation, as-needed reconfiguration, and enhanced information flow throughout the enterprise.

There are numerous technical barriers, some owing to the complex nature of real-time data, which must be overcome to achieve manufacturing execution system interoperability in a general and reusable manner:

• The automation of legacy system integration is not well understood and requires techniques to map information and behavior across different technology generations and system architectures.
• A certain degree of functional tailoring always will be necessary to meet the needs of a specific, changing manufacturing facility. No formal, widely applicable methodologies exist.
• Critical production operations, particularly those in multisite, multinational enterprises, require systems that can be modified on-line, in real-time.
• Adaptable systems require new ground to be covered in the area of autonomous software systems, particularly areas such as agent technology, self-describing interfaces, support for multiple communication paradigms, knowledge representation, sharing and reuse, capture of knowledge and context, and self-modifying software entities.
• Technologies to support self-integrating applications, similar in concept to installation programs for PC application suites that query the characteristics of the platform environment, are currently non-existent.

Industry Commitment. The American Electronics Association highlights systems integration as one of four critical areas needing R&D resources, while the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors lists manufacturing integration tools as one of the industry’s highest priorities. Similarly, the National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) includes MES integration among the most important infrastructural issues that must be solved in order for U.S. electronics manufacturers to succeed in the global marketplace. NEMI cites the lack of an agreed-upon open framework for integration as a major impediment to future competitiveness, and identifies ATP focused programs as an important mechanism for meeting this need.

In addition, significant interest has been expressed by member companies of several major consortia, including the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS), the Manufacturing Execution Systems Association (MESA), the Object Management Group (OMG), Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing—International (CAM-I), and SEMATECH.

Significance of ATP Funds. The technologies that this focused program aims to foster are primarily infrastructural with proof-of-concept applications: they constitute an underlying foundation required to enable and support important applications of information technology to manufacturing. Like other types of infrastructure, these sought-after technologies are recognized as being the means to realizing widely shared benefits, but individual private interests do not have sufficient incentive to develop them on their own. In the case of manufacturing information infrastructure, individual companies also do not have the capabilities needed to develop the full collection of underpinning technologies.

MES vendors, for example, are reluctant to invest in the information infrastructure for manufacturing because they are not likely to realize a competitive advantage. The MES industry is too fragmented for any one vendor’s integration approach to dominate the marketplace, or for any one vendor to invest substantial resources in the uncertain prospect of establishing its technology as an industry standard. Industry revenues in 1994 totaled an estimated $1.15 billion, for an average of about $4 million per firm. Of the some 280 MES vendors in the United States, fewer than 10 have sales totaling more than $10 million a year. As a result, investments in R&D are modest. If MES vendors allocate 13 percent of revenues for research, as is typical in the software industry, the average MES vendor spent about $530,000 on R&D last year, with the bulk of that amount directed toward new product development. In sum, MES vendors are not likely to develop integrable MES technology on their own.

Individual manufacturers will pay for functional capabilities. They do not invest in infrastructural technology that will yield benefits of equal—and perhaps greater—value to competitors who did not share in the costs. MES vendors realize that, for their industry to thrive, they must develop the basis for architectures, interfaces, and other core technologies essential for truly integrable systems

As a catalyst, the ATP can help MES vendors and manufacturers to overcome this impasse and focus their collective expertise and to concentrate some of their resources on surmounting the barriers to developing integrable MES architectures and applications. Eliminating these barriers requires the participation of multiple industries to ensure widespread adoption of the technologies. On the basis of input from a variety of industries, the ATP concluded that both MES vendors and manufacturers see it in their best interests to participate in such efforts.

Additional Information. For information about eligibility, how to apply, and cost-sharing requirements, contact the Advanced Technology Program:

(800)-ATP-FUND (800)-287-3863
http://www.atp.nist.gov
e-mail: atp@nist.gov
fax: (301) 926-9524
A407 Administration Building
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-0001

For technical information, contact:
Amit Bagchi, Program Manager
(301) 975-3638
email: amit.bagchi@nist.gov
fax: (301) 926-9524

Date created: January 1999
Last updated: February 26, 2007