MAPICS, Georgia Tech pilot program for electronics manufacturers.

MAPICS Inc. (Atlanta, GA, www.mapics.com), a provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain software for manufacturers, has announced that it has broadened its relationship with The Georgia Institute of Technology's (Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA) Manufacturing Research Center (MARC). This relationship includes leading a series of pilot implementations of a next-generation information exchange framework for electronics manufacturing.

MAPICS has been involved with Georgia Tech's MARC for nearly three years and leads the Framework Implementation Project (FIP) as the only manufacturing-focused ERP solution provider involved. The purpose of the FIP program is to design, implement and test industry standards that streamline information exchange for electronics assembly and link all aspects of a manufacturing enterprise in real-time.

"We're using live factory environments to prove that electronics manufacturers can reduce the cost and time of manufacturing their products by decreasing the complexity of communication among shop floor equipment and extended enterprise applications," said Steven Danyluk, director of Georgia Tech's MARC.

The MARC, with the backing of major equipment manufacturers, electronics manufacturers and software and hardware vendors, has established the FIP to build upon and implement the National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) Plug and Play Factory Project--an initiative created to standardize data syntax and semantics in electronics assembly, establishing rules for data exchange from the factory floor and across the enterprise.

The coalition is implementing and testing a computer-aided manufacturing exchange (CAMX), a series of standards that are based on extensible markup language (XML) and define how and what information is exchanged on the factory floor and throughout a manufacturing organization. These standards, which electronics manufacturers know as the IPC 2500 series, are used to provide a common language that facilitates real-time, efficient sharing of critical business data among shop floor equipment and business process applications--reducing costs and decreasing cycle time.

To date, three in-plant deployments of the FIP have been completed: September 2002 at Motorola's plant in Seguin, TX; January 2003 at NACOM's plant in Griffin, GA; and February 2003 at the Nortel Networks plant in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, In all three projects, the CAMX standards provided real-time data about products, processes and the shop floor equipment, giving users access to information such as work in process, throughput, yield and equipment utilization.