Companies trying to reduce waste, downtime, and cost in the face of today’s volatile and uncertain markets are increasingly seeking out a new form of manufacturing intelligence (MI) software sometimes called operational intelligence (OI). Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) products typically do not offer the granularity and speed required for plant employees to understand a situation and act in time to have an impact on performance.
OI software delivers real-time dashboards that can improve speed and ease to change the data sources and metrics displayed. Beyond that, each company’s and even each plant’s needs may diverge. In fact, some companies will need more than one approach to intelligence in their operations. So, consider some of the following issues:
IT requirements – Some OI solutions are toolkits; others have templates or are even simple applications or pre-calculated metrics. There are pros and cons in time to value vs. extensibility and configurability over time, and a few products offer both. Increasingly, MI/OI software is available as either an on-premises package with a fat client or Web-browser interface, or a SaaS/cloud hosted setup. Whether you opt for on-premises or hosted, you will need to configure the system and connect to your data sources.
Data store vs. no data store – Providers with a data store, such as OSIsoft and Invensys Operations Management, point out that large numbers of users conducting analysis point to benefits in faster analysis response time. Those like SAP (MII) and Siemens Energy (XHQ) argue that replicating data can cause problems. Some of the latter now use in-memory cache for analysis.