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By Debra Haverson and Gordy Hoke Most business leaders are struggling to bring their companies up to Internet speed, yet they can't take shortcuts when it comes to regulation and, more importantly, public safety. These sometimes conflicting challenges are perhaps most acute for high-tech manufacturers that deliver products upon which our very lives depend. In the aerospace industry for example, cybermarkets are fast becoming the way to go to do business. Aircraft parts supplier Middle River Aircraft Systems found its e-commerce initiative to be a competitive necessity. The effort required fast, easy access to up-to-date parts information, yet the company had to ensure continued compliance with the Federal Aviation Administration's mandates regarding airworthiness documentation. Safety and regulatory demands were equally important at Hollister, a medical products manufacturer that generates 14,000 documents per day. While speed to market and regulatory compliance are two powerful motivators, these two manufacturers paid attention to regulation, customer service and consumer safety. After all, no matter how cybersavvy and e-commerce enabled a company might be, quality, accuracy and customer satisfaction are still the ultimate gauges of business success. Parts Catalogs Drive Online Transactions According to Ralph Reed, e-commerce leader at Baltimore-based Middle River Aircraft Systems, the customers' critical requirements must serve as the starting point for any initiative. A manufacturer of thrust reversers and other aircraft parts, Middle River has several types of customers, including the engine manufacturers GE Aircraft Engines and Pratt & Whitney, the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, and the more than 750 airlines and airline overhaul facilities worldwide. Middle River is targeting this latter customer group for the first projects in its e-commerce initiative. The vision, says Reed, was to develop a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce strategy to stay ahead of the competition, and it was imparted in 1999 by no less an authority than Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, the parent company of GE Aircraft Engines as well as Middle River Aircraft Systems. It helped that GE Aircraft Engines had already initiated its own B2B efforts by making the component maintenance manuals and illustrated parts catalogs for its CF6 engine line available through a customer support portal. Naturally, Middle River couldn't copy the solution of the larger company, but it had confidence in selecting Enigma, Burlington, MA, and SpaceWorks, Rockville, MD, the vendors chosen for the original project. GE Aircraft Engines and Middle River have many common customers, so having a parallel solution for the parts supplier's CF6 thrust reverser product line made sense. Customers would gain a single view when accessing information on this crucial engine component. At press time, Middle River's portal-based maintenance manual and parts catalog were set to go live in early October, and they are expected to provide instant, round-the-clock access to documents exceeding 5,000 pages, each requiring semiannual data revisions. When mechanics access these documents online instead of using bulky paper manuals, they gain the ability to search the data, use hotlinks to related illustrations or applicable service bulletins, and, most importantly for the e-business initiative, generate parts shopping lists. The mechanics can forward the lists to their purchasing departments or to an online order management system as required. The project also involved General Graphics, York, PA, the provider of Middle River's hard-copy manuals, which will continue to be published. General Graphics takes the raw data revision feeds, updates the digital masters that reside in its publications system and prepares hard-copy reproduction masters for scheduled distribution. It also provides XML coding and performs the final quality checks needed before the information is passed to Enigma'sCommerceSight application, which is priced at about $150,000 per server. CommerceSight creates the electronic publications, links to bulletins and searching capabilities, and creates the shopping cart feature. The shopping cart interacts with order management software from SpaceWorks' WebBusiness Manager Suite. The online order management system furnishes real-time pricing and availability information as part of the process of supporting the online transactions. Customers gain efficiencies by using tools such as saved order lists and wildcard searching. They can also use features like alternate parts information and configuration histories to find alternatives for specific needs. At the back end of this process, the order management system will pass information to Middle River's planned Oracle ERP system, which is to be rolled out by mid-2001. The company expects the entire system to feed useful information to the capacity planning function on the plant floor. "It's important to have a clear understanding of responsibilities and a common overall project schedule among the players," says Reed. "We have a weekly conference call to update status and resolve project issues. This works pretty smoothly because Enigma and SpaceWorks have already collaborated on similar projects." Most computer-savvy users have become accustomed to - perhaps even spoiled by - the ease and instant access that online searching and retrieval delivers. It's easy to imagine the value and peace of mind that a busy airline mechanic finds in knowing that he or she can set aside paper manuals and easily locate the documentation for a part, and also the most current related service bulletins. Reed says Middle River will make it a priority to add safety documents when posting updates to online documents. In the future, Middle River expects to economize on paper-based publishing, which currently exceeds 1.6 million pages printed and distributed annually, but legal issues still make this impossible today. Reed says the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has legitimate concerns about replacing the paper publications it approves as "airworthiness documents" with purely electronic versions. GE Aircraft Engines has worked with the FAA for nearly a year to gain approval for online versions of manuals, but they must still carry the disclaimer that they are reference documents only, not the official FAA-approved documents. Pending further resolution, the FAA remains concerned about:
The need to provide both paper and electronic catalogs prevents immediate cost savings on print prepress production, however, Reed says the company expects at least to reduce the number of multiple copies per customer by at least half. The real payoff of this application lies in its ability to bring parts ordering online. Middle River anticipates a reduction in manual administration of customer orders by 40 percent to 60 percent. "From a strictly bottom-line point of view, we expect it will take several years to recover our investment, but it's hard to quantify the final tally, because it depends on how quickly we gain customer acceptance," says Reed. "We are taking a conservative stance, but the more paper that goes away and the more orders that are processed online, the greater the reproduction and administrative savings." Middle River will gain additional speed and efficiency once these Internet applications are integrated with ERP. "The real power of Web-enabled ERP," he adds, "is the systemic interaction between outside events and internal planning. New demand pushes the planning system that in turn reschedules production activity to optimize the production system. Not every demand will be satisfied all the time, but exceptions will automatically fall out for further review. Order status will be automatically updated and available to the customers online." This implementation represents only the first of three portals planned by Middle River. The other two will be an intranet employee portal and an extranet supply chain portal that will allow for collaborative design and manufacture using the Web to request bids or other information from suppliers. Medical Manufacturer Brings Docs Under Control Medical devices play a vital role in health care, but getting them to market is an arduous task. Health and safety precautions and Food & Drug Administration (FDA) regulations require painstaking documentation of meticulous procedures. This was a critical concern of medical manufacturer Hollister of Libertyville, IL, when it moved from a mainframe to a client/server environment. As part of its effort to resolve Y2K concerns, the company was implementing an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system from SAP. "We were under a lot of time pressure, and we had so many changes going on," says Bill Ferguson, Hollister's corporate director of quality management. "We had our own custom application on the mainframe, so we looked to migrate to a very compatible system." Preferring something that would require minimal coding, Hollister chose a turnkey enterprise compliance management system from Qumas, Florham Park, NJ. Hollister manufactures nearly 2,000 products, including ostomy, wound care, patient identification and OB/GYN devices. Even though the company avoids such high-drama items as defibrillators and pacemakers, the risk of liability is high. Precise documentation can minimize that risk. "Our 450 [system] users generate about 14,000 documents a day - each three to four pages in length," says Ferguson. "The demands come from our four plants plus corporate headquarters. Everything has to be documented: calibration methods, quality assurance, descriptions of microbiological test methods, assessments, sterilization records and other matters. We also have product and component drawings on the Qumas system." Six categories of users, from a system administrator to workers on the manufacturing floor, are connected to Qumas through a WAN. The central repository resides at the home office. Security is ensured with ascending levels of privileges, from viewing to creation and revision rights. Drawings and requests for changes originate at Change Councils at the plant and corporate levels, and a Corporate Approval Panel reviews new and revised documents before they take effect on the system. Qumas manages the entire change control process, including version control, electronic approval, and transmission of documents and archives. The system also delivers reports about changes and maintains an audit trail for every stage and access. "With our document management system and database, companies can review all aspects of their record creation and management over a period of years," explains Qumas president Kevin O'Leary. "Companies like Hollister must retain and be able to retrieve records for the life of the product and far beyond. We provide for the daily management of records in their native file format, plus a PDF rendition for FDA regulations." The Qumas audit trails offer complete histories. "I can tell you every person who has read and/or changed a document, anywhere, at any time," O'Leary says. "[The system] can tell you not only that it was changed but also what was changed, why it was changed, who initiated the change, who the author was, who executed the change and everyone who approved the change. We want to give our users every possible bit of information that relates to a given document."
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