By Sam Somashekar, Senior Product Management / Marketing / Strategy Consultant
Learn more about trends in manufacturing business intelligence and view a demonstration of Decisyon/Plant. This webinar has completed but you can register to view the recording.
There’s a new breed of analytics growing in popularity among manufacturing firms. Operational Intelligence, also known as Manufacturing Intelligence, integrates and analyzes data from a variety of plant sources and translates raw data feeds into actionable information that can be viewed in context.
Operational Intelligence enables manufacturers to connect the dots between operations KPIs and critical business metrics. As a result, they gain insight into everything from asset utilization to machine uptime and plant-floor productivity while also monitoring energy usage, uncovering the cause of quality problems, and ensuring consistent production across multiple lines. Predictive analytics allow manufacturers to model business scenarios and get answers to make-or-break questions such as, “When will my production line go down unexpectedly in the next 6 months?” This enhances an organization’s ability to be adaptive in satisfying forecasted demand.
Manufacturers have been increasing their reliance on BI and analytics software to help them reduce costs, improve quality, optimize the supply chain, and boost customer service. Dashboards, scorecards, and other visual key performance indicators (KPIs) make it easy to understand current state and issues at a glance. Next-generation dashboards introduce cutting-edge capabilities such as in-memory processing, advanced search functionality, the ability for users to combine data from multiple sources, mobile capabilities and the ability to link insight to action. They keep workers focused on the right metric in real time so that they can make adjustments quickly if things start to go south.
It’s important to note that not all decisions are made in a vacuum. Plant employees and senior executives managing broader supply chain metrics and commitments must collaborate around a set of facts to make an informed judgment call. In addition, the ability to execute that decision from within the environment where that very same decision was derived is very powerful and helps to document the link between insight and action. Decisyon, a Chateaux partner, provides a tool called Decisyon/Plant that enables these capabilities.
Decisyon/Plant, based upon the Decisyon 360 platform, is first and foremost a visual manufacturing optimization solution. It provides the ability to link plant systems for streamlining information flows and integrating plant operations – connecting ERP, MES, SCADA, LIMS, MHS, legacy systems, and unstructured data. Decisyon/Plant then combines processes and data into a “Virtual Control Room” that visualizes plant operations. It then allows managers and operators to communicate around real-time data, assisting in fast decisions that can be executed directly back into plant processes to address them in the required context.
Collaboration is an important aspect to an Operational Intelligence solution. The struggles of translating insights into action is not so much due to the tools, but the lack of ability in making sense of the large amounts of data that is being presented. By providing a unified environment that allows for contextual collaboration and the ability to execute decisions, employees can collectively learn about how to use data and its results. In essence, you will create a data-driven organization based upon a self-service actionable analytics platform.
To learn more about trends in manufacturing business intelligence, and to see a demonstration of Decisyon/Plant, register to see the recorded webinar.
