Make manufacturing part of the supply chain

Manufacturers have been investing billions to integrate their operations. Most of this investment has been in business systems that target individual layers of the organization, such as manufacturing execution systems and enterprise resource planning. To the surprise of many, these investments are not delivering the expected returns. Manufacturing need planning and execution agility to play their part in the new virtual supply chains. They also need highly efficient operations and responsiveness to market changes in `Internet time'. With e-commerce evolving into manufacturing processes, data integrity and reliability from manufacturing processes are even more crucial in responding to supply chain demands from customers.