Present at the creation: On the accasion of MSIs 20thanniversary, industry analyst Erik Keller looks at two decades of IT in manufacturing and supply chain

摘要

"Robots." That was the word an editor put into my ear in the early 1980s, like "plastics" was put to a young Dustin Hoffman in the 1960s movie, The Graduate. But unlike plastics, it turns out robots are much more prone to boom and bust. Robots were just one of many fads in manufacturing over the past two decades, including industrial computers; the Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP); computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM); and even ERP. All had in common a great vision, but uneven execution. But despite some ill-conceived approaches, savvy manufacturers made gold from dross.