Editorial insights exclusive to ManagingAutomation.com

The Master Class Series: Part 4 - The BI-to-Performance Management Transition: The Shop Floor View

by Joshua Greenbaum, Contributing Editor

Posted on Thursday, January 03, 2008 3:00:00 PM                                     

Performance management doesn't just represent a new set of marching orders for executive management; it promises to have a profound effect in the manufacturing plant as well. That effect will be seen at multiple levels: new data sources, new connectivity from the shop floor to the back office, and new processes and improvements to existing business processes. And, most important, the impact of performance management techniques on the shop floor will help drive overall revenue, profitability, and other goals across the enterprise.

Though the shop floor has never been short on data — what manufacturing plant doesn't have its MES and SCADA systems — it has traditionally been short on the kind of metrics and analytics that typify the shift to performance management. This is primarily because of the siloed nature of shop floor analytics, which have been much more concerned with the day-to-day management of plant-wide production issues than with the larger question of how plant performance impacts overall corporate performance and vice versa. The elimination of shop floor data silos will be the first way in which performance management changes what happens in the manufacturing plant itself.

As the silos of information begin to break down at the plant level and the different forms of plant-level data become more accessible both within the manufacturing site and across the enterprise, these data sources will become more and more connected to the ERP systems used to run corporate back-office operations. That connectivity will set the stage for a broader performance management function based on a blend of back-office ERP and shop floor data.

[Click to continue]