The MOMi Guide – Overview and Configurability

My final activity in this blog is to discuss the MOMi (Manufacturing Operations Management Institute) Guide, covering configurability, first.

Why I Am Writing About the MOMi Guide

Let me begin by telling you about MOMi. MOMi is an outcropping of people who specialize in manufacturing operations management, including software. That software includes LIMS/ELN software that is suitable for manufacturing processes. The group writing this Guide used to write the Guide in a “past life,” so to speak. They have begun a new effort to create this guide.

They asked me if I would write the foreword to the 2020 Guide and to tell my readers about it. I looked at the work they were doing with the Guide and believed that would be a good fit with my blog topics. However, all that happened back when I was still consulting. Before I began my current position, I asked my future employers for permission to finish my work with MOMi and they did give me the permission I needed so, here I am, writing about this.

Just to be clear, my current employers are unrelated to this effort. I do not speak for them in any way with this blog post.

More on the MOMi Guide

The MOMi Guide had previously covered MES systems. This year, the Guide will now cover LIMS/ELN, as well. These guides are quite a lot of work so MOMi is currently working with just these two topics. Next year, they will add two more areas, and they will add the final two the year after that. There will be six total software types covered, two years from now. For one example, a future topic that they will add is PLM (Product Lifecycle Management). So, you can imagine that each year adds not just quite a lot of questions that are specific to the type of software, but another list of software vendors, as well. That is why they are adding topics, incrementally.

The Content of the MOMi Guide

With all this said, if you wonder what is in the MOMi Guide, a lot of it is what you would expect from a guide, such as this. It includes a wide variety of questions that are combined into logical groups. Unlike other guides, keep in-mind that this guide is specifically focused on software for manufacturing. From looking at the drafts of the Guide, I would not say that narrowing the focus means that they have fewer questions and topics. Instead, it is more that what they do have is particularly relevant to this specific area.

MOMi Guide – Configurability

Let me start with the MOMi Guide Configurability section. We always have the conversations about what it means to be “configurable.” When we select software, we want to know if it’s “configurable.” Then, if it is, what type of configuration is it? For example, in GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) software, we might write a thousand lines of code and still call it “configuration.” So, the topic of configurability is always of interest to us when we go out to buy or assist someone in buying a new system.

For that reason, the first example I want to show you from the MOMi Guide is the Configurability section. Keep in-mind that all of this is still in its Draft mode. The sections are not yet reviewed nor is the final layout yet determined. With those warnings, here is an example of the Configurability section as filled-out by an example software vendor:

Notes

As you can see, software vendors get a Microsoft Excel workbook full of these types of questions. They fill them in and send the entire thing back. To deliver to the rest of us, the effort was made to reformat the responses to something helps us visualize the responses. There is a lot of work done by each software vendor to fill out the responses. Next, there comes much work from MOMi to double-check that the responses are correct. Then, they check back with software vendors when they think there is a mistake.

To present all of this, MOMi works to find the best way to show the results. In this case, pie charts seem to be a way to help us understand the combination of responses from this example software vendor:

In this example of the Microsoft Excel sheet with some responses and its potential report, you get an idea what the sections will tend to look like.

Finally

So, this is just meant as an introduction to the MOMi Guide. In upcoming blog posts, I will give yet more examples. While this post was meant to give you an overall idea regarding how the process works to create and deliver the Guide, the next posts will give a wider idea of the types of topics in the guide.

Of course, this is the LIMS/ELN example. You can imagine that, in this particular case, the MES example would look quite similar, if not identical. When the Guide gets into specific questions that relate to product features, of course these two will not look alike.