Real-time performance management requires an intelligent backup
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
There's no getting around the fact that companies need access to real-time plant-floor data. And as they shift toward real-time performance management (RPM), says Craig Resnick, research director at Dedham, Mass.-based ARC Advisory Group, they need real-time data collection and connectivity to establish operational context and expose manufacturing information to the rest of the enterprise.
Problem is, while a manufacturer typically has a human-machine interface solution on the plant floor, and may also have a manufacturing execution system based around databases and vertical knowledge, manufacturing intelligence falls between the two, says Russ Agrusa, CEO of manufacturing intelligence solutions supplier Iconics.
To fix that particular disconnect, Milwaukee-based automotive supplier Johnson Controls Automotive (JCI) is using an enterprisewide reporting application based on Iconics' BizViz manufacturing intelligence software suite that delivers real-time lean-manufacturing reports based on key performance indicators, real-time visibility into product quality, overall equipment effectiveness, and product tracking and tracing.
At JCI, a great deal of data is collected and archived at the plant-floor level. The Iconics solution enables visualizing and analyzing that data, Agrusa says.
“To significantly improve performance, it's vital to not only identify a problem and determine its cause, but to go even further and perhaps determine that a number of various alarms may all ultimately be caused by a single problem,” Agrusa says. “That way a company can address the root problem, which solves other resulting alarms and enables overall performance improvement.”
Beyond the buzzwords
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