Sitronics

Maria Yurgelas: The efficiency of using IT for comprehensive production management is constantly improving

Maria Yurgelas, Managing Director of SITRONICS Information Technologies in Russia, answered questions from Sergey Zhishkevich, chief editor of website Upravlenie proizvodstvom (Production management).

- You have been dealing with lots of top managers of production companies for many years. Could you tell us what has changed in their attitude towards using IT to improve production efficiency over the past five to seven years? What issues have they already mostly resolved and what challenges do they face now?
 
- One of the key challenges that a large modern enterprise faces today is to establish reliable control of the whole amount of heterogeneous data, which is stored and processed in various information systems associated with business processes that are often not standardised. Based on our experience, I would say that top managers clearly understand that planning systems tailored to tasks of the past are no longer capable of meeting new production management requirements. Given these circumstances, the main trend in the application of automation tools in the manufacturing sector is to migrate to industry-specific ERP systems, and especially to functionalities such as material resource planning and production capacity planning. 

But while betting on ERP systems, companies are often unaware that before implementing an industry-specific resource planning system one has to cope with numerous tasks such as updating product directories, creating or updating necessary bills of materials, preparing and standardising operation sheets and routings, putting work centres on record, etc. 

- Many Russian enterprises are turning to comprehensive development of their production systems. What can you say about the role that IT solutions play within enterprise production systems? Is it possible to evaluate the maturity of the production system based on the maturity of the company's IT system? 

- Even with having accumulated vast experience in the field of developing process control systems, the goal of applying a comprehensive approach to automation has still not yet been met. Many enterprises continue papering over the cracks in their systems and production chains. This produces certain challenges for integrators, such as to standardise and describe existing business processes, automate the most important of them and develop 'glueware' to ensure compatibility between software and hardware from different manufacturers; it is no secret that components of those 'archaic' systems' are often incompatible and do not meet current business requirements. 

It's impossible for a manufacturer to manage huge volumes of data that have been accumulated over a long period of time manually or even in a semi-automatic manner. That is why IT is crucial in creating effective infrastructure to support production management. 

As for the maturity, if we are speaking of the Russian industry, and not the Western one, I suppose we are lagging behind the world by 5 to 7 years in regards to level of automation.

- In your opinion, do a lot of Russian enterprises, effectively use IT in production management? Who are the best, and why do you think so? 

- I would say that the efficiency of using IT for comprehensive production management is constantly improving. This process is driven by many factors, such as the attraction of foreign investments, the growing maturity of the industrial sector, a steady narrowing, though not fast enough, of the gap between Russian and western companies, through intensive upgrading of existing IT infrastructures and switching over to a centralised data processing model to ensure that all required information is available at the right time and in the right format to enable top-level executive decision-making. 

Let me tell you about the project implemented by SITRONICS for Bashneft, which is a good example of effective IT use. Last year, Bashneft launched a project intended to improve operational efficiency in terms of management through comprehensive automation of key business processes with the help of the industry-specific Enterprise Resource Management system by SAP. To ensure smooth functioning of key business applications within SAP ERP we had to create high-reliability, fail-safe, high-performance IT infrastructure. 

To address these tasks, the SITRONICS Information Technologies design team developed a unique configuration of Mobile Data Processing Centre (MDPC) Daterium-3 to include high-end equipment from the world's leading vendors. As a result, Daterium-3 was successfully deployed at Bashneft, and the industry-specific SAP ERP system was installed based on it to support the company's key business processes. 

- Many IT projects for the implementation of production management systems fail or, at the very least, do not meet the expectations of top managers.  To your knowledge, why does it happen and what in particular should be taken into account to make projects successful? 

- Let us remember what one of the great classical writers said: happy people are all alike, and every unhappy person is unhappy in their own way. I think that every ERP project which failed should be considered separately. Management might have provided inadequate support for the project, or the users might have received insufficient training in the new system, or the project tasks might have been poorly defined, and as a result, the functionality in place turned out to be redundant or, on the contrary, scarce. 

The most important stage of the ERP system implementation is what we call 'goal-setting'. This stage includes collecting the customer's guidelines and formulating of goals and tasks, which forms a shared vision of the project in the eyes of the customer and the contractor. Understanding how important this stage is determines the project's success.  The customer represented by its management need to be aware of where the money goes and why. This ensures the management's personal involvement and assistance with the project inside the company, which is the key motivational factor for the staff and helps minimise possible rejection of the system by employees. 

In addition to that, when automating production management, you should pay special attention to the selection of both the hardware and the software platform. Both platforms must be evaluated against the company's current and long-term needs, corresponding subsystems must be upgraded and/or created, such as for process control and energy supply control, and required recruitment activities and training must be held both for technical staff and business users. 

 - What are your predictions? What are the prospects for development of IT systems in Russian industrial enterprises? What challenges will most of them confront over the next few years? 

 Industrial regeneration in Russia should have a reliable basis in terms of technology and technical facilities. In this case, development will be in line with the strategy of upgrading existing infrastructure and centralising resource management across the enterprise based on industry-specific ERP systems that follow the current trends in IT growth.