As manufacturers push to respond with more agility to accelerating rates of change, technology vendors increasingly are supporting that drive with a wide range of new software tools. Among them are tools that provide manufacturers with highly usable, real-time information about what's going right and wrong on the plant floor and across supply networks. Vendors also are focusing on tools that allow manufacturers to quickly make decisions and take action based on that real-time visibility. And, finally, software vendors are making strides to make their own products more flexible and better able to change as business imperatives shift.
"Today manufacturers need a mix of real-time data that can give them a bird's eye view of what's going on at any minute as well as an ability to deal with problems as soon as they happen," says Romain LeVault, vice president of sales and business development at manufacturing operations management software vendor Intercim LLC.
Intercim, like some other providers, is developing software that will not only provide manufacturers with real-time plant floor information, but also let them easily visualize and react to shop floor events and exceptions.
In June, Intercim sealed a joint development deal with product lifecycle management software provider Dassault Systèmes that will create a tight integration between the two companies' products. That integration will let manufacturers easily model and visualize plant equipment and processes in real time, with Dassault's V6 PLM platform providing the 3D modeling and visualization capability, and Intercim's MOM software providing real-time plant floor data. Using 3D plant models, managers would be able to easily see whether a machine on the shop floor is working and the status of a given production process in a local or remote plant. Managers would be able to instantly provide work instructions to a specific plant cell to resolve nonconforming situations.