ORLANDO, FL -- In what may have been his final public presentation as Activplant Corp.'s president and CEO, co-founder Dennis Cocco yesterday introduced a set of new manufacturing intelligence products that promise to change the way manufacturers decipher and respond to plant-floor performance data.
The London, Ontario company used its Manufacturing Intelligence Summit here to unveil ActivEssentials, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that extends the capabilities of its existing Activplant Performance Management System (APMS) and its patented Universal Factory Data Model (UFDM), both of which provide basic manufacturing insight to plant-floor managers. APMS and UFDM have worked well in gathering production data and identifying bottlenecks, but what's been missing is informational clarity, according to Activplant officials.
By plugging in to the ActiveEssentials infrastructure existing productivity tools such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and a new set of Activplant analytical applications, plant-floor managers can more clearly see how their production lines are performing in near real time. "The challenge has been that there is too much information," said Cocco in an interview with Managing Automation in which he disclosed that he would soon be handing over Activplant's operational reins to a new CEO. With current manufacturing intelligence systems, he said, "You're told the symptom, but you don't know the problem. It's not about visibility, it's about clarity."
To that end, Cocco developed a formula that is based on two guiding principles: The theory of constraints (as laid out by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his book The Goal (Gower Publishing Ltd., 1986) and lean initiatives that emerged from the Toyota Production System (TPS).
Unlike most manufacturing intelligence products that "push" every conceivable data point into an analytics engine, ActivEssentials "pulls" key performance metrics from the manufacturing process by focusing on four core production aspects: uptime, downtime, speed, and quality.
ActivEssentials comprises four key components: Insight, a real-time set of web services, reports, and queries; Gateway, which facilities data exchange between business systems and APMS; Collect, which is composed of logic engines to transform raw data to contextualized information; and Operations, which includes execution modules that can customize APMS to specific operations.
The first tool to be rolled out for ActiveEssentials is Activplant's Insight for Microsoft Excel. Unlike many export tools that require some data manipulation, Activplant Insight for Excel provides a live link (using a web service) that connects Activplant's APMS software to appropriate cells in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This is critical since many manufacturers still manage production operations by using Excel.
"Excel is like oxygen," said John Fikany, general manager of Microsoft Corp.'s U.S. enterprise manufacturing sector, during a presentation at the summit. Although manufacturing intelligence is complex, the user needn't feel overwhelmed by it, he noted. "By putting [MI] in a format that people are comfortable with, you are giving tremendous power to the user."
Indeed, the underlying simplicity of Activplant products has been a main attraction. Australian Coca-Cola franchise Coca-Cola Amatil Pty. Ltd., for instance, began using Activplant APMS in conjunction with Citect's SCADA product and Microsoft SQL Server in 2003.
The software was piloted at the company's Northmead bottling facility in Sydney with the help of an integrator, SAGE Automation SA. But the use of the application was self-taught, said Wayne Luxford, process improvement coordinator at Coca-Cola Amatil's Northmead factory, in interview with Managing Automation.
The APMS pilot project resulted in a 97% decrease in the number of jams on a problematic section of an air conveyer, and a 14,000 case per week improvement in output by remedying in-feed issues on one line, Luxford said. "But it's the intangibles I can't tell you enough about," he noted.
Such intangibles include a means for more easily extracting information needed to understand potential production line improvements. "Activplant didn't solve the problem, but it's a tool that allows us to more accurately [identify it]," he explained. "Before it was purely observational, and there's a lot of data that is missing with pen and paper."
But even with the performance gains that Luxford experienced, Activplant officials said new manufacturing applications also introduced yesterday called ActivApplications can be layered on top of the ActivEssentials infrastructure to more effectively diagnose and resolve problems such as those that Coca-Cola of Australia was experiencing.
These applications include Throughput Analyzer, which takes the constraint-based approach to maximizing flow of product through the plant, and Product Launch Acceleration, which provides real-time insights into product-line performance based on uptime, downtime, speed, and quality metrics.
Together, these applications can help plant managers determine exactly where adjustments are needed to optimize line performance.
Additional products expected to be unveiled later in the year include Batch Optimization, which focuses more on clarity within a particular batch, and the Traceability application, which presents plant-floor operators with a complete quality picture.
Amid the product transition, Cocco, who co-founded ActivPlant in 1998 and has been deeply involved in the company's product strategy, will be stepping down as CEO. Cocco told Managing Automation that a six-month external search will culminate with the introduction of a new CEO within the next month. He declined to provide additional details.
Cocco will remain with the company, working in the role of visionary. "I'm an entrepreneur driven by innovation; I don't have the personality to be a CEO," he said, noting that he set a goal early on in Activplant's development to step away from the operational side of the company once a certain milestone was reached.
While he declined to say what that goal was, it appears to have been met. "I'll have more impact on the company now by concentrating on innovation," he observed.