Activplant simplifies plant-floor tracking, reporting with Excel interface
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2006 7:00:00 AM
Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software is the most common planning tool used in manufacturing, and "spreadsheet hell" refers to the confusion that follows when each tracks his own version of the truth in his own personal planning tool.
Manufacturing intelligence software vendor Activplant says users can still have the convenience of the Excel interface while taking steps to ensure collaboration based on shared information. Its just-released Insight for Microsoft Excel product lets users create functions and detail reports—using data collected by the company's Activplant Performance Management System (APMS)—in Excel.
Users browse data in APMS, filter it based on need, and, taking advantage of the system's service-oriented architecture (SOA), pull data into matrix cells in Excel.
"Because data is populated in real time in Excel, every cell in every worksheet is a window into manufacturing operations," says Dennis Cocco, president and CEO, Activplant. "Insight is a wizard-based snap-in to Excel. It gives you reporting flexibility and the ability to quickly create custom reports, even with limited knowledge of the Activplant database."
Cocco says using Insight can save manufacturers up to 50 percent of the cost of traditional custom reporting.
Insight was developed in conjunction with Microsoft's Peak Performance Initiative and has been beta tested in operations at Gillette, Bosch, and Toyota (see story below).
The reporting module maintains a live Web link to APMS. Reports for upcoming months are automatically populated with relevant data as it becomes available. Users store and share reports with other applications in Microsoft Office, says Cocco, adding, "Templates and reports may be saved and published as XML components in Microsoft SharePoint Portal."
According to Boston-based AberdeenGroup, users are looking to a new generation of manufacturing execution and intelligence systems—combinations of business process models and rules, workflow technology, Web services, SOA, libraries of component applications, and industry standards—to manage production and to collect, aggregate, and contextualize production data for display in custom reports or dashboards.
Bill Swanton of Boston-based AMR Research calls manufacturing intelligence initiatives "low-risk, high-reward projects" that can yield payback in six months or less. He cites one small project that paid for itself almost immediately by preventing a single downtime event on one machining center.
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