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The Need for Manufactoring Information
Further productivity gains will be best achieved, not by further automation, but by providing these workers at every level in the enterprise with new insight into the manufacturing process to help them to make better decisions.
- At the line level people need to understand how equipment is performing to be able to make decisions on streamlining operations, and improving efficiency and throughput.
- At the plant level people need to understand production as it relates to the customer, so that they can make intelligent decisions about procurement, production scheduling and shipping.
- At the enterprise level people need to see production in its larger business context, and to understand the impact of fluctuating costs, changing market conditions and asset performance to make the right decisions about what to make and where.
The Information - Challenge
Empowering decision makers with timely, clear and context rich information presents a number of technical challenges: The information is fragmented, residing in multiple different systems scattered across the enterprise.
- A variety of different Control Systems, HMI (Human Machine Interface) systems, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems and Historians have vast amounts of real time and historic data about the plant and the product it is producing.
- Business systems including ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, SCM (Supply Change Management) systems and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems have information about orders, inventory levels, and customers and their preferences.
- Point applications like APS (Advanced Planning Systems), MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), Maintenance Management Systems and LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems) contain information about things like forecast demands, production schedules, recipes, maintenance schedules and product quality.
Different proprietary user interfaces present only part of the picture, and make it extremely difficult to correlate and interpret the data.
- The UI of a production scheduling system is designed to schedule production. The inventory system UI helps users manage inventory. The user interfaces of these systems support specialized functionality, and are not designed for general decision making purposes.
- Clearly the process of accessing data via multiple different UIs, and manually correlating and interpreting the data does not empower better decision making
Business Intelligence Solutions
BI (Business Intelligence) solutions today allow many companies to integrate data across different business systems, to support sound decision making in nonmanufacturing environments. These business intelligence solutions include:
- ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools to extract the data from remote systems in either batch or online mode, and transform, clean and load the data as necessary.
- A data model to provide an integrated and consistent view of the data that is available, abstracting the specifics of where the data comes from and where it is stored.
- Analysis services to aggregate summarize and correlate the data.
- Data visualization, dashboards, reporting tools and portals to make the data easily accessible and understandable, presenting context rich data in eye catching format, highlighting trends and exceptions.
Power users gain insight into the business using analytic applications and data analysis tools. Casual users inside and outside the organization can access comprehensive business information from portals via their browsers. Developers and third party applications access these systems via web services or more traditional relational interfaces.
The Manufactoring Difference
Although BI solutions have enjoyed success in non-manufacturing environments, and are starting to empower knowledge workers with actionable information, they have typically not extended into the manufacturing environment. Manufacturing Intelligence solutions will require the capabilities of a BI solution, and the ability to address those challenges unique to manufacturing:
- The time series data that describes plant and equipment behavior is very different to the transactional data found in traditional business systems, and requires specialized handling, transformation and loading techniques, as well as specialized visualization and reporting tools.
- Control and supervisory systems are implemented in a bottom up manner; in contrast to the top down approach adopted by business systems like ERP. The resultant gap in the middle makes it difficult to correlate plant and business data.
- Specialized adaptors and connectors are often required to extract data from control systems.
- A data model suitable for manufacturing needs to reflect the equipment, product / material and people hierarchies in manufacturing, and be adaptable to accommodate custom data structures and concepts.
Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence
Analysts such as Advanced Manufacturing Research (AMR), Automation Research Council (ARC), and Gartner now recognize manufacturing intelligence as a growing market. AMR defines EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) as a separate market and says:
EMI is a rapidly evolving class of software applications and product capabilities that help synchronize real-time production operations with the more ponderous world of ERP and BI applications. EMI is a packaged, cost-effective alternative to high-maintenance homegrown applications and/or costly Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) initiatives.
Manufacturing intelligence involves gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to information in real time for decision support.
Incuity Solutions
Incuity is an Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence solution that integrates silos of data across the manufacturing enterprise, empowering decision makers with timely, clear and context rich information.
The Incuity solution coexists with your existing control systems and business applications, and exposes the full value of the data locked in these systems by presenting a coherent picture of your manufacturing business through familiar browser and Microsoft Office interfaces.
Incuitys zero install client software, self configuring capabilities and pre-configured reports provide immediate insight into the manufacturing process to drive better decisions, directly impacting business performance.
Incuity provides the foundation for a range of manufacturing analytics including:
- Real time executive dashboards
- Automated Production reporting
- Key Performance Indicator (KPI) monitoring and alerting
- Downtime analysis and reporting
- Process verification
- Process optimization
Incuity can be deployed at the line or equipment level and be extended to cover plant-wide and then enterprise wide manufacturing information with full reuse of engineering efforts.
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