Week of January 12, 1998 Feature Article IBM's Server Group Takes the LEAD IBM's Server Group (Somers, N.Y.) won the 1997 LEAD (Leadership and Excellence in the Application and Development of enterprise-wide integrated manufacturing) industry award at the AUTOFACT '97 conference, held recently in Detroit. The award, presented by the Computer and Automated Systems Association of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (CASA/SME), recognized IBM's Server Group as "an outstanding example of enterprise integration." The committee commended the group's strategy to use teams worldwide for process simplification, consolidation and deployment of information technology (IT) applications. The Server Group is changing from full-service/single-brand manufacturing facilities to multi-brand production facilities supported by a common, global information framework. These single, worldwide management structures now support a network of scaleable production fulfillment centers where, previously, the manufacturing processes, support structure and IT infrastructure were formerly optimized for each IBM manufacturing plant. Due to the Server Group's changes, between 1994-96 IBM saw on-time shipments improve worldwide 20%, order-to-ship cycle time fall 30% and ship-to-delivery cycle times cut 40%. Total output rose 15%, manufacturing spending fell 19% and production sites were effectively reduced from 12 to nine. According to the LEAD Award committee, "The legacy systems are fully used and maintained as IBM's many divisions move rapidly to new off-the-shelf applications. Senior leadership has been involved throughout the project and had intimate knowledge of the process. At the operations level, employee pride and accomplishments were obvious." Purdue University won the LEAD university award for its multi-disciplinary manufacturing program, believed to be one of the largest such programs in the U.S., with 3,300 students currently enrolled. The Manufacturing Report © Copyright 1997, 1998 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. E-mail Editorial Dept: tmr-editorial@lionhrtpub.com Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 2555 Cumberland Parkway, Suite 299, Atlanta, GA 30339 USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com Web Design by Premier Web Designs E-mail: lionwebmaster@preweb.com