| A | Shari, Yes, SAP's acquisition of Lighthammer and subsequent re-branding of the IP as xMII puts SAP in the EMI space for SAP clients. However, there are a number of other vendors who provide varying levels of manufacturing intelligence capabilities. The main differentiator is the "E" for Enterprise. There are a raft of small companies which offer software packages that you can use to acquire, aggregate, analyze, and display metrics on plant level (generally Microsoft based) dashboards. The kicker is that few of these companies have deployments that bridge multiple sites ... most are used within single sites, and then, many are used for OEE applications and little else is done with the data being collected. That said, there are some interesting vendors out there, such as Informance, ActivPlant, Incuity, IGear, and ShopLogix -- and this is not an all-inclusive list. When we talk about EMI, we generally talk about the following base set of capabilities: - Aggregate: Consolidates information from a variety of real-time and diverse back-end data sources, including automation, historians, Manufacturing Execution System (MES) operational databases, Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) applications, and relational database systems.
- Contextualize: Creates and maintains persistent functional/operational relationships between data elements from disparate sources. It may be useful, for example, to maintain relationships between particular named process variables and ranges of time-series data, product quality, and yield data. Relationships will be determined by business rules and user roles.
- Analyze: Transforms data into real-time performance intelligence through the application of business rules, such as calculating the range of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) using raw process performance and cost-based information from ERP and other business-level systems.
- Visualize: Provides intuitive graphical representation of intelligence that supports context-based navigation of information based on persistent interrelationships, enabling drill-down from multiplant representations to individual facilities, and to individual systems of record as required.
- Propagate: Automatically transfers relevant operations performance information to the business-level systems, including ERP and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), on an as-needed (event-driven) basis. This frees users from the task of manually updating data entry screens, reducing not only the time it takes to get data from the production floor to the business systems, but reducing the likelihood of transcription error as well.
Few "EMI" offerings, including xMII, provide coverage for all categories, but on the other hand, you may only require a subset for your particular application. My suggestion is that you use this list of capabilities as a starting point for mapping out your own specific requirements, and then evaluate vendor offerings for goodness of fit against those. Be aware that the major difference between SAP's xMII and other EMI offerings is that xMII does not provide a data model, nor does it offer a database in which to persist any KPIs that it calculates. You will have to build your own, or figure out which data is appropriate to push to a data warehouse. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you want clarification on this last point. Alison |