1.3 Classic IT Support in Production

In the early years of information technology, manufacturing enterprises were mainly "controlled" by commercially oriented systems. It was a gigantic step forward to automate classic manually oriented commercial services and to manage bookkeeping, inventory and orders received electronically. In the next stage of this process of automation it was possible to provide some of the above-mentioned production structures and control methods with support from so-called EDP systems. The milestones here were detailed planning of orders, resolution of orders into individual operations or sequences of operations, and the breaking down of products into individual assemblies. Supervisors in production were supplied with lists which contained sales planning information and the customer orders to be produced. Consumption of time, materials and other resources were reported back to the EDP system from production and this information recorded there a complex method which was also likely to be encumbered with errors. Simpler and better was to send a status report once individual departments started to be equipped with dedicated data collection systems. In this way the EDP side was provided with a production data acquisition facility, the personnel department with staff work-time logging and the quality assurance department with a so-called CAQ system. It was possible to achieve considerable reductions in the cost of data acquisition and the different expenditures on this could be assigned to individual products or production orders more accurately than previously as regarding their origins.

These mechanisms, however, only covered the tasks to...