Managing Automation

Today, when your company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system senses that an important component needed to assemble your highest-margin product is almost out of stock, it dispatches a software agent to a trio of approved suppliers’ catalogs to find the most parts on the best possible terms. Once the part is located, your ERP system places an order directly in the chosen supplier’s order-entry system, which sends a shipping invoice to your ERP accounts receivable module. The order ships the next day, arriving at your sub-assembler within 48 hours, where it is scanned and accounted for in your company’s inventory management system (which was expecting the part following a communication from the procurements module). Payment is scheduled in the accounts payable module for 30 days out — all without any human intervention.

Sound like nirvana? Maybe. But if leading Web researchers have anything to do with it, it will be reality. Web-based applications interoperability standards are in place and technologies are being tested to prove how this type of interoperable, hands-free computing can reduce everything from fat finger re-keying errors to human misinterpretation of data. For manufacturers, taking advantage of these technologies would bring significant — even disruptive — competitive advantages including better integrated and less costly supply chains as well as more seamless engineering, production and distribution processes.

Key to all of this is the Semantic Web, whose technological underpinnings have been in development since the mid 1990s when commercial Internet applications were still a gleam in the eyes of many business people. In its raw essence, the Semantic Web is an extension of the technologies that brought the World Wide Web to life — the browser, the Internet Protocol for transport, extensible markup language (XML) and HTTP, which enables the linking of hypertext within Web pages. Throw in some artificial intelligence (rules-based constructs) and agent technology and, the theory goes, businesses can create applications that have the inherent ability to interpret meaning from, or even reason with, one another. To many, the Semantic Web — conceived by Web progenitor Tim Berners-Lee — is the next step in the Internet’s evolution; one that manufacturers must prepare for or risk getting left behind.

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