Monday, April 20, 2015

In Memory of Ziggy: A Cautionary Tale for Smart Manufacturing


By Patrick Weber, MESA International Technical and Education Committee member

The late 90’s were heady times in the battery industry.  The Sony Walkman cassette players that had been all the rage were giving way to CD and other digital technologies. Digital cameras were supplanting 35mm as the consumer choice for photography. New and innovative battery-driven products were appearing daily.  Energizer and Duracell were in a continuous battle for who could produce the longest-lasting portable power solutions to keep these devices going.  The long-term prospects for the battery industry were for constant growth – and constant change.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

5 Ways Pharma and Medical Device Manufacturers Can Use Technology to Promote Quality and Compliance

By Eric Weisbrod, International Board Member of MESA International 

InfinityQS shares five tips on how the pharmaceutical and medical device industry can use enterprise quality systems, Manufacturing Intelligence platforms and automated device integration technologies to streamline compliance procedures, reduce recalls, speed time-to-market and increase profitability. 

Monday, April 6, 2015

How to Stop Rising Emergency Preventive Maintenance Costs




By Ananth Seshan, Chairman, MESA Asset Performance Management (APM) Working Group and MESA International Board Member at Large
 
One of the main objectives of Asset Performance Management is to maximize the net return on production assets. This requires maximizing availability by maintaining the assets in good health. This in turn is achieved by adopting a sound policy of maintenance interventions.  Too much intervention is costly.  Too little – again costly!  In other words, we need to arrive at an optimal balance of proactive and reactive interventions.

Proactive maintenance includes any activity performed for maintaining an asset before it fails. Reactive maintenance is any maintenance activity performed after a failure. Proactive maintenance comprises the following activities:  Emergency Preventive Maintenance (EPM), Preventive Maintenance (PM)and, Predictive Maintenance (PdM).


Reactive maintenance comprises two types:  Emergency Corrective Maintenance (ECM) and Non-Emergency Corrective Maintenance (NCM).  Achieving optimal balance would mean increasing the cost of Proactive Maintenance appropriately in order to reduce the cost of Reactive Maintenance substantially.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Who Drives Change?

By Patrick Weber, MESA International Technical and Education Committee member

 Lately I've been thinking about change initiatives within an organization, particularly about who owns these initiatives and harnesses them to achieve true value. Whether it’s Lean, Theory of Constraints, Product Lifecycle Management, Business Process Management, Manufacturing Operations Management, Supply Chain Management, Resource Consumption Accounting, or even Project Management, someone must champion the initiative from conception to integration. There is, of course, a whole management consulting industry around organizational change, and I think that’s a valid approach for assisting change. However, consultants do not have ownership of the initiative; they can sell and support, but only the owner can derive business value.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Join the development of the Smart Manufacturing Strategy?

By Conrad Leiva, MESA International Board Member


The governments of China, India and the United States have all identified “Smart Manufacturing” as a strategic lever for long-term economic growth.  Similarly, the government of Germany has Industrie 4.0.  All these countries are looking to define how to leverage the advances in modern Information Technologies to make manufacturing a cog in their economic engines.