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by Mary Brandel, Contributing Editor Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 5:33:00 PM   In their pursuit of lean manufacturing and demand-driven strategies, manufacturers are increasingly interested not just in improving their real-time view of manufacturing data -- such as job status, work in process, shop floor inventory, quality data and capacity utilization -- but also putting it in context with business data such as customer orders, product specifications and cost information. Call it business intelligence, manufacturing intelligence or supply chain intelligence; it all boils down to a need to answer strategic business questions that require the juxtaposition of data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with plant floor and manufacturing execution systems (MES). "Manufacturers need to use a lot of real-time data but in a broader business context, such as relating plant performance to schedule adherence or quality data to production orders," notes Colin Masson, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston. [Click to continue] |