The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 1998
Nortel built factory data and decision support into one system in under a year
Operations researchers designed Nortel's PCS1900 plant IT so workers see quality, inventory and cycle time live.
Nortel
The solution
A new PCS1900 cellular-equipment plant needed quality, inventory and cycle-time data to run well, but traditional shop-floor systems delivered that information late and scattered, forcing costly delays while staff gathered and analyzed data.
Nortel recruited a team of operations researchers and engineers to design and implement the plant's enterprise information system in less than one year: online measurements plus linked analysis tools for real-time decision support, served over the intranet with Netscape.
The system worked because the analysis lived next to the data: production workers, managers and engineers all looked at the same live numbers and could act on them immediately, ending the old gather-transfer-analyze cycle.
Why it worked
- Live measurements removed the gather-then-analyze delay
- Shared intranet access aligned workers, managers and engineers
- OR leadership made the decision support first-class
What can be applied
Instead of bolting analytics onto old systems, let OR people design the information system itself so the data and the analysis ship together.
Aftermath
The project marked a shift from traditional shop-floor IT deployment at Nortel and became a showcase for OR taking a leadership role in factory information systems.
Sources
- Nortel Redefines Factory Information Technology: An OR-Driven Approach
- Nortel Redefines Factory Information Technology: An OR-Driven Approach (abstract)
- Nortel redefines factory information technology: An OR-driven approach (abstract)
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