The Bee Hive

Recently I was asked, "Why is implementing lean manufacturing such a big deal? The book I just read suggests I only need to worry about managing the value stream. Why is it so hard to do?"

While the effort required to be successful in an enterprise resources planning (ERP) system implementation is fairly well documented and understood, implementing lean and world-class manufacturing is far less clear. To help those who have a strong background using ERP systems, let's draw some analogies common to both types of implementations.

With the widespread emergence of standards-based integration technology such as Web services and extensible markup language, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become the key to interoperability among disparate processes and pieces of software. The current demand for for SOA is motivating forward-thinking solution providers to design applications specifically for reduced complexity, efficient data sharing, and collaboration throughout the supply chain.