The 2006 New Year is upon us and we at NWA are looking forward to an exciting year filled with new challenges. Global manufacturing expansion will continue robustly in Asia and Eastern Europe as new market places evolve and worldwide competition pushes new boundaries. In the USA, the business investment in new factories and equipment is forecast to increase to a 9.8% rate in the first quarter driven by strong economics, consumer demand, housing rebuilding from hurricanes, and improved balance sheets (Bloomberg, Jan. 4). Information Technology spending in the USA is predicted to increase to 2.5%, according to a Merrill Lynch report based on 100 CIO surveys, or up to 5.0% according to IDC, Jan. 4. Gartner’s Worldwide IT Benchmark Group (30 countries, 20 industry sectors, Jan. 4) says that the majority of industries will cautiously increase worldwide IT spending in 2006 - the manufacturing sectors with the highest projected change are directly involved with global expansions.

It’s a stated national goal in China to use the latest automation technology in its manufacturing so that it can be not just a low-cost producer, but the most efficient and highest quality producer in the world for the long-term. Information Technology continues to be where productivity improvement gains have the greatest leverage.

Our customers are looking to get more decision-making analysis value out of their silos of databases. More customers want high level, reliable analysis across product lines, production facilities, and global supply chains. This message is confirmed by industry research analysts such as ARC in their report: “Intelligent Factories: Are We There?” January 14, 2004.

We hear from our customers that they want easier to understand, easier to interoperate, easier to make decisions, and broadly used software that can be standardized and integrated into their global operations. That’s why our current NWA Suite is fully featured with automation Run Files, Data Break-down functions, Exception Reporting (to consolidate monitoring/alerting on multiple parameters), and QA Web Server to deliver SPC content globally into a customer’s supply chain.

The next evolution addressing customer wants that we foresee is being driven by global competitiveness to achieve manufacturing continuous process improvement. There are various name tags for this such as Operational Excellence, Six Sigma, Manufacturing Intelligence, Real-time Performance Management, etc. but the core objective is the same – continuous (some think of it as relentless) process improvement. The technology approach to meet these customer wants has its basis in improved aggregated analysis and visualization. The software is expected to provide this in digital dashboards that may be individualized by job function (see AberdeenGroup study, “Manufacturing Transparency: Turning Visibility into Value” January 3, 2006 where one-third of the respondents have dashboards and one-third plan to have dashboards within 18 months).

NWA will be describing, over the next few quarterly newsletters, how our current NWA Suite and Services can get you there. Our future products will continue to reflect our commitment to meeting the evolving needs of our customers and providing the advanced analytics that will drive process improvements.

back to top