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Oil and gas Manufacturer ABB Vetco Gray offers pressure containing equipment and services for the complete range of requirements for its customers worldwide. The product offering covers the spectrum from single well onshore drilling projects to multiple well deepwater facilities and sub sea production systems. ABB Vetco Gray also provides "Life of Reservoir" support for its customers and products. Field life management, asset management, maintenance services, spare parts, and special needs services are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. All this is done from three main manufacturing sites in Aberdeen, Houston, and Singapore. All sites produce similar products and use some of the same parts. Some parts on a drilling rig or a well site are the size of a house, so it's not practical to keep all parts in inventory at all sites. At the same time, it may take three months to build one part to get a rig repaired. At a cost of nearly $250 thousand a day for a downed operation, numbers quickly become staggering. It's more cost effective by far for ABB to ship a part from any of its three locations to any other than it would be to redesign and build a part. In April of 1995, IntegWare created a partnership with ABB Vetco Gray to develop a solution that would control every piece of engineering data flowing through their worldwide organization that was used in the development of new products, or in the modification of existing products. The solution also needed to feed into their manufacturing processes. The result was a series of complementary solutions called Product Information System (PIMS), Supplier Information Management On-Line (SIMON) and Worldwide Inventory System (WISE). Together these solutions would elevate information visibility worldwide, and act to save ABB and it's customers millions of dollars in the cost of halted operations and unnecessary man-hours spent re-inventing the wheel. Before PIMS was implemented, processes were controlled on paper, and parts controlled by a customized CICS system. PIMS was the first step in the global visibility solution. It acts as a master data system and works on top of ABB's existing PLM. The key to PIMS value is that each site constantly replicates its files to PIMS. Through PIMS each site can then securely access vaulted drawings and BOMs, and participate in sign off processes. SIMON and WISE are web-based systems, complementary to PIMS and allow access the MRP and Inventory systems respectively. These three systems in ABB Vetco Gray's global data warehouse are extremely powerful tools in resource management. For example, order-processing functions can now securely connect current version drawings from PIMS, to POs and RFQs. This connects the supply chain directly to the design source. Furthermore, they can search inventory worldwide to provide accurate delivery schedules. And there is no confusion over which part may need to be shipped or made since the BOM and drawing files are always viewable to both buyers and suppliers. Despite the acronym tongue twisters, the results eliminated significant internal hoop jumping on the part of design, manufacturing and accounting alike. Answering basic and business-critical questions is a task of which every person in an engineering process must be capable, without lag time due to time zones, language barriers, and least of all, lost information. Complementary systems like these enable a global company to function as a true dispersed team. And when information visibility makes itself visible on your bottom line, you'll know that you too are running like a well-oiled machine. -ed |
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