Toward Zero Blog for Digital Transformation Best Practices

Digital transformation advisors, supply chain experts, smart manufacturing engineers, data and applications architects, and manufacturing business consultants showing manufacturers how systems should work and how to get the ROI you expect.

Diane Murray

Diane Murray
Senior Director of Marketing


DIANE MURRAY has spent the last 20 years proclaiming the value of enterprise performance solutions for manufacturing, supply chain, retail, banking, healthcare and many other arenas. As a Senior Director of Marketing with Toward Zero, she focuses on capturing and reporting client success stories, engaging the industrial community, and nurturing vendor partnerships. Prior to Toward Zero, she was a Senior Content Manager and Research Associate with LNS Research; her editorial contributions spanned the breadth of that firm’s research including Industrial Transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), along with factory of the future, manufacturing operations management, industrial analytics, asset performance management, quality management, and the connected worker. From 2006 through 2015, she was an evangelist for MES, EMI and ERP systems offered by Informance, Solarsoft, and Epicor, and collaborated with cross-functional teams to accelerate sales pipeline, create sales enablement, develop content, refine positioning, and grow market awareness. Before her tenure with Epicor and companies it acquired, Diane worked with several businesses, as a staff member or as a strategic consultant, to plan and implement content marketing, create integrated marketing, write solution sales training and support marketing automation. Diane's passion is building and sustaining relationships with customers and stakeholders, and has enjoyed the marketing craft for just over 30 years. She calls herself "relentlessly inquisitive;" books, cooking and languages feed her innate curiosity “almost” as much as collaboration in the industrial enterprise tech space.
Find me on:

Recent Posts

What is COE for Manufacturing Production Scheduling?

Supply chain executives aren't just asking, "What is COE" … They’ve seen how other companies have successfully created a center of excellence (COE) to maximize the impact of their digital transformation. Manufacturers have used these COE’s as a unified way to set standards, drive continuous improvement, provide ongoing training, and cultivate innovation across the global enterprise. Given the success of these initiatives, supply chain leaders are urging their own company to apply this same concept to production scheduling. A center of excellence (COE) for production scheduling is a cross-functional collaboration to establish best practices and maximize the value of digitalization investments. However, the dialogue and efforts aren’t strictly limited to how to use the production scheduling platform. Manufacturers with a production scheduling COE focus on driving enterprise business results by:

  • Aligning people, processes, and technology;

On-Time Edge & Toward Zero Announce Merger Agreement to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Merger of On-Time Edge and Toward Zero combines two companies with shared vision and values to help manufacturing companies accelerate digital transformation for manufacturing operations excellence and agile, accurate supply chains.

CESMII Award for Collecting Smart Manufacturing Data is Only Step #1

CESMII just named Toward Zero the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Award winner for its groundbreaking achievement in collecting smart manufacturing data from CNC machines. During an interview with Aaron Muhl, founder and president of the smart manufacturing engineering firm, I learned more about the award and the innovations that led to CESMII honoring the Toward Zero team.

3 Production Schedule Problems (and how to solve them like a boss)

It's not easy to narrow down the toughest production schedule problems schedulers face. We're hard-pressed to even imagine a "day in the life" guidebook for the manufacturing schedule heroes that balance inputs like materials, resources, inventories, customer service obligations, on-time order commitments, business rules, maintenance needs, and myriad other requirements to tackle complex optimization problems. We do know that there are three particularly difficult — yet common — situations that cause angst for shop floor schedulers that use spreadsheets, a whiteboard, or other manual methods to respond when the unexpected happens in the plant. Companies that arm production schedulers with an advanced planning and scheduling solution can respond and adapt to constantly changing conditions on the shop floor. Manufacturers that rely solely on the ERP system aren't usually equipped to handle events that happen in real time on the shop floor.

Deciding if Production Scheduling Software is Right for Your Company

If you’re an operations leader or a production planner in manufacturing, you might know how hard it is to get top management approval for production scheduling software. Where technology funding is concerned, senior executives will often question why the ERP system isn’t enough to keep the daily manufacturing schedule on track. However, the ERP system isn’t usually equipped to handle events that happen in real time on the shop floor. When everyday problems disrupt production orders, the people in charge of production scheduling and operations management can join forces to decide if production scheduling software is right for the manufacturing company. Building a business case for production scheduling software helps you quantify the financial impact, articulate how it impacts business goals, and create a powerful tool for engaging corporate executives.

OEE: 3 Questions Clients Always Ask, and 4 They Should (but Don’t)

Manufacturing companies are still eager to use OEE.  Some industry analysts say that it's “dead,” but not everyone in manufacturing agrees.  Yes, it’s high-level, and as a standalone metric it’s not particularly actionable.  However it’s also a powerful measurement that nearly anyone in a company can quickly digest and use as a starting point to uncover why things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to.  That’s not to say that OEE hasn’t been the subject of significant debate — and even angst — since it first made an appearance in Seiichi Nakajima's 1982 book TPM Tenkai. (later published as Introduction to TPM: Total Productive Maintenance, also by Seiichi Nakajima).

MES Tug of War: The Battle Continues

We see it constantly: “corporate” insists on one brand of MES, while the manufacturing plant wants something different. The execs running the show regionally or globally don’t trust plant management’s choice, while the plant believes corporate’s pick won’t work for them ― because “their situation and production environment is different.”  This kind of battle isn’t limited to one or just a few industrial sectors ― indeed, automotive manufacturers, life sciences companies, food and beverage manufacturers, and consumer products manufacturers (also known as CPG companies) around the world have all seen and are at risk when the “MES tug of war” ensues.

1

Diane Murray

Diane Murray
Senior Director of Marketing


DIANE MURRAY has spent the last 20 years proclaiming the value of enterprise performance solutions for manufacturing, supply chain, retail, banking, healthcare and many other arenas. As a Senior Director of Marketing with Toward Zero, she focuses on capturing and reporting client success stories, engaging the industrial community, and nurturing vendor partnerships. Prior to Toward Zero, she was a Senior Content Manager and Research Associate with LNS Research; her editorial contributions spanned the breadth of that firm’s research including Industrial Transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), along with factory of the future, manufacturing operations management, industrial analytics, asset performance management, quality management, and the connected worker. From 2006 through 2015, she was an evangelist for MES, EMI and ERP systems offered by Informance, Solarsoft, and Epicor, and collaborated with cross-functional teams to accelerate sales pipeline, create sales enablement, develop content, refine positioning, and grow market awareness. Before her tenure with Epicor and companies it acquired, Diane worked with several businesses, as a staff member or as a strategic consultant, to plan and implement content marketing, create integrated marketing, write solution sales training and support marketing automation. Diane's passion is building and sustaining relationships with customers and stakeholders, and has enjoyed the marketing craft for just over 30 years. She calls herself "relentlessly inquisitive;" books, cooking and languages feed her innate curiosity “almost” as much as collaboration in the industrial enterprise tech space.
Find me on:

Recent Posts

What is COE for Manufacturing Production Scheduling?

Supply chain executives aren't just asking, "What is COE" … They’ve seen how other companies have successfully created a center of excellence (COE) to maximize the impact of their digital transformation. Manufacturers have used these COE’s as a unified way to set standards, drive continuous improvement, provide ongoing training, and cultivate innovation across the global enterprise. Given the success of these initiatives, supply chain leaders are urging their own company to apply this same concept to production scheduling. A center of excellence (COE) for production scheduling is a cross-functional collaboration to establish best practices and maximize the value of digitalization investments. However, the dialogue and efforts aren’t strictly limited to how to use the production scheduling platform. Manufacturers with a production scheduling COE focus on driving enterprise business results by:

  • Aligning people, processes, and technology;

On-Time Edge & Toward Zero Announce Merger Agreement to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Merger of On-Time Edge and Toward Zero combines two companies with shared vision and values to help manufacturing companies accelerate digital transformation for manufacturing operations excellence and agile, accurate supply chains.

CESMII Award for Collecting Smart Manufacturing Data is Only Step #1

CESMII just named Toward Zero the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Award winner for its groundbreaking achievement in collecting smart manufacturing data from CNC machines. During an interview with Aaron Muhl, founder and president of the smart manufacturing engineering firm, I learned more about the award and the innovations that led to CESMII honoring the Toward Zero team.

3 Production Schedule Problems (and how to solve them like a boss)

It's not easy to narrow down the toughest production schedule problems schedulers face. We're hard-pressed to even imagine a "day in the life" guidebook for the manufacturing schedule heroes that balance inputs like materials, resources, inventories, customer service obligations, on-time order commitments, business rules, maintenance needs, and myriad other requirements to tackle complex optimization problems. We do know that there are three particularly difficult — yet common — situations that cause angst for shop floor schedulers that use spreadsheets, a whiteboard, or other manual methods to respond when the unexpected happens in the plant. Companies that arm production schedulers with an advanced planning and scheduling solution can respond and adapt to constantly changing conditions on the shop floor. Manufacturers that rely solely on the ERP system aren't usually equipped to handle events that happen in real time on the shop floor.

Deciding if Production Scheduling Software is Right for Your Company

If you’re an operations leader or a production planner in manufacturing, you might know how hard it is to get top management approval for production scheduling software. Where technology funding is concerned, senior executives will often question why the ERP system isn’t enough to keep the daily manufacturing schedule on track. However, the ERP system isn’t usually equipped to handle events that happen in real time on the shop floor. When everyday problems disrupt production orders, the people in charge of production scheduling and operations management can join forces to decide if production scheduling software is right for the manufacturing company. Building a business case for production scheduling software helps you quantify the financial impact, articulate how it impacts business goals, and create a powerful tool for engaging corporate executives.

OEE: 3 Questions Clients Always Ask, and 4 They Should (but Don’t)

Manufacturing companies are still eager to use OEE.  Some industry analysts say that it's “dead,” but not everyone in manufacturing agrees.  Yes, it’s high-level, and as a standalone metric it’s not particularly actionable.  However it’s also a powerful measurement that nearly anyone in a company can quickly digest and use as a starting point to uncover why things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to.  That’s not to say that OEE hasn’t been the subject of significant debate — and even angst — since it first made an appearance in Seiichi Nakajima's 1982 book TPM Tenkai. (later published as Introduction to TPM: Total Productive Maintenance, also by Seiichi Nakajima).

MES Tug of War: The Battle Continues

We see it constantly: “corporate” insists on one brand of MES, while the manufacturing plant wants something different. The execs running the show regionally or globally don’t trust plant management’s choice, while the plant believes corporate’s pick won’t work for them ― because “their situation and production environment is different.”  This kind of battle isn’t limited to one or just a few industrial sectors ― indeed, automotive manufacturers, life sciences companies, food and beverage manufacturers, and consumer products manufacturers (also known as CPG companies) around the world have all seen and are at risk when the “MES tug of war” ensues.

1