The revolutionary impact of plant-floor computerization

Given budget constraints and a shortage of qualified personnel, "There are fewer people in plants today doing cool things," says Gregg Le Blanc, a product director with OSIsoft, and given his wealth of hands-on experience, goatee, and hip glasses, he would know.

Moreover, Le Blanc's casual remark validates human capital management, the focus of The Bigger Picture special report in this issue, as relevant to manufacturing enterprises.

Mass customization, knowledge specialization, outsourcing, and precipitous growth of megacorporations increase coordination needs aimed at manufacturing system flexibility. The search for the right information consumes too much time. Dealing with the complexity of resulting interactions is a challenge.

OSIsoft is a $100-million-plus innovator celebrating its 25^th year in business. It brought data historians into wide use in process industries. And its RtPM Platform brings technologies for data historians, portals, integration, and analytics to bear in pursuit of better, timelier decision-making.

Despite years of effort, it's proved difficult to translate operational data into a flow of financial or otherwise relevant data to corporate executives. Author Geoffrey Moore has said management "based on identification of a few key parameters doesn't seem to be happening. Upper management is primarily a social function. What's changed is the growing communications bandwidth available to them."

On the other hand, the late Peter Drucker some years ago noted, "The revolutionary impact [of computerization] so far has been where none of us anticipated: on operations."

RtPortal is OSIsoft's family of visualization products, able to display operations metrics within Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server or SAP Enterprise Portal. Says Tom Fiske, an analyst with ARC Advisory Group, "RtPortal allows companies to deliver information to employees at any level of the organization."

What's relevant to human capital management is the personalization that comes, for example, from SharePoint Web parts, which are customizable components for the portal, created with a digital dashboard. The parts "plug into" enterprise systems for needed data.

OSIsoft uses messaging technology—called, inevitably, RtMessenger, and based on Microsoft's corporate messaging platform—to support instant communication within the ad hoc groups that rapidly form and dissolve in the course of project management.

More generally, OSIsoft has embarked on an initiative, called Foundation, to make its technology more accessible to the educated generalist.

One aspect is unifying capabilities of the PI data historian's two main context databases: the Module Database and Analysis Framework. Another allows access to data outside the PI System to enable manipulation and linkage.

"We need to make provision for a wider range of information sources, without actually 'owning' the data in our databases," says Le Blanc. "We need to achieve 'operations data management' by consolidating analysis tools and allowing ad hoc queries."

The initiative's results will be released throughout 2006, with "a big release" in 2007. The goal is "simplicity, security, and availability." The hope is that users will commit to a framework that delivers quick results, and then establish a practice for discovery of new uses.

Manufacturers, says Le Blanc, will "discover the right things so as to do the right things. A commitment to the infrastructure leads to validated metrics for a wide range of users."