UF Joins IBM To Help U.S. Manufacturers Get Technological Advantage

June 28, 1996

GAINESVILLE — Joining forces with IBM and several other companies, researchers at the University of Florida are attempting to give hundreds of thousands of American manufacturers a leg up on foreign competitors.

UF and IBM are part of a seven-member consortium beginning work on a three-year, $26-million project announced earlier this year by then-U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. The goal: Make the latest computer technology accessible to the majority of American manufacturers who currently can’t get it.

“The basic problem in the manufacturing industry in this country is that foreign countries have the advantage of cheaper labor,” said Stanley Su, director of the Database Systems Research and Development Center at the UF College of Engineering. “We can’t beat them in labor costs, but we can beat them with technology. So, this is very critical. This is applying new technology to solve manufacturing problems.”

That’s why this project is so important, Su explained. American manufacturers must be able to apply modern technology to produce better quality products at a higher speed, lower cost, and be more flexible to meet the needs of their markets.

The idea is simple. Su compares it to a stereo system, in which components from different manufacturers can “plug and play” together. In today’s manufacturing environment, that’s not the case. While large companies can afford to develop their own product design, planning, scheduling, and manufacturing execution systems tailored to their own needs, the developed systems usually operate on dissimilar computing platforms with different operating systems, file or database management software and hardware systems. They cannot be easily shared among large companies or used by smaller manufacturers.

“So it would be ideal if some information technology can be developed so that systems developed by one manufacturing company can be easily accessible and made interoperable with those of the other,” Su said. “You need to be able to link them through the national or international networks such as the Internet, so that a manufacturing plant in Germany can have an on-line access to the data, software, and hardware resources of other plants in the United States or other nations.”

The technology is trying to catch up with the needs of today’s rapidly evolving business world, where companies increasingly are working together to form virtual enterprises, Su said. It’s not uncommon nowadays to see several companies in different countries come together to work on some multi-nation projects. This means that “they need to access and share each other’s resources,” Su said.

“If one company has a very good engineer design, manufacturing execution, or product scheduling system, other companies that form the virtual enterprise should be able to use it,” he explained. “This kind of technology will allow them to make the best of their resources.”

To do that, researchers must establish an open architecture and develop protocols to enable the interoperations and “plug and play” of manufacturing executions systems. The project, known as SMART (Solutions for MES-Adaptable Replicable Technology), is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program, a government/private-sector partnership program aimed at stimulating economic growth and job creation.

Modern computer and information technologies have enabled the automation of several aspects of manufacturing, including enterprise information systems geared towards management and long-range planning, and equipment control. More recently, a class of software applications has evolved to automate the processes in between — namely, to track, manage and schedule jobs on the shop floor in real-time.

While these applications provide manufacturers with critical functionality, the technology to integrate them with each other and throughout the enterprise is conspicuously absent, placing manufacturing solutions out of reach for 90 percent of the country’s manufacturing sites. That’s where Su comes in.

Working with the National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) consortium on an on-going $60 million project funded by the Advanced Research Project Agency, he and his research group have an object-oriented, knowledge-based management technology, which, among other functionalities, manages “knowledge rules” that govern the interactions and behaviors of the various component systems. The developed technology will be deployed in the SMART project, which will be managed by the NIIIP consortium.

The SMART project will officially kick off in July and will take three years to complete. If researchers are successful at integrating the newest software technologies and application systems, U.S. factories will soon be better able to adapt to specialized and varied orders. With added productivity and agility, companies will be able to react to rapidly changing business opportunities and compete more successfully in the global market.