In a bid to help manufacturers get a high-level, cross-enterprise view of how well their plants, equipment, and organizations are performing, Informance International today unveiled Informance Enterprise Solution, a version of its Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) product.
The Enterprise Solution adds to Informance's existing set of Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence products advanced analytical tools that allow users, for example, to perform what-if analyses in real-time on plant data across multiple facilities and to conduct closed-loop analysis, comparing operational and network performance with targets.
Enterprise Solution joins Informance's plant-level products -- Informance Plant Module for Discrete Manufacturing and Informance Plant Module for Process Manufacturing, which provide data collection, data models, and presentation capabilities. Enterprise Solution also joins the company's Enterprise Reporting product, which has been on the market for six months and allows manufacturers to consolidate and report information from across multiple plants.
The analytical capabilities that are part of Informance Enterprise Solution will help top-level manufacturing executive fill in gaps between their high-level strategies and the steps that need to be taken at the plant level to achieve them, said Sudy Bharadwaj, chief marketing officer at Informance.
"Executives today have the vision, but they need to translate that into tactics," Bharadwaj said today during a Managing Automation Webcast where Informance unveiled the new product. "By benchmarking and analyzing their enterprises, executives can get all sites to the level of their best-performing sites," he noted.
With the new analytical tools in Enterprise Solution, for example, manufacturers can perform a cycle erosion analysis of all plants in their network to determine where and why capacity losses are occurring. Manufacturers can also analyze overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by stock-keeping unit (SKU) to gain insights into item-level profitability, Bharadwaj said.
Such analytical capabilities are becoming increasingly important to manufacturers, said Colin Masson, a research director at AMR Research, during today's Webcast. Accelerated new product introduction rates, shorter product lifecycles, and regulatory requirements are putting more pressure on manufacturing companies to improve operational efficiency and enable plants to quickly respond to changes in demand, he said.
"With shorter product lifecycles and more product variance, using inventory as a buffer to guarantee supply is becoming increasingly risky," Masson noted.
At the same time, Bharadwaj contended, many manufacturers are seeing plant utilization levels rise, prompting them to seek operational efficiencies rather than build expensive new capacity.
All of that, Masson added, is leading to increasing investments by manufacturers in technologies that can be used to track, analyze, and improve operational efficiency. In a recent AMR survey looking at spending priorities among manufacturers, the largest percentage of respondents -- 15% -- cited manufacturing operations as the area on which they will target spending, Masson maintained.
In another recent AMR survey, 75% of manufacturers said multi-site visibility of production KPIs is "very important," Masson pointed out.
One company that is focusing on such issues is Cargill Inc., the large, privately owned maker of food and pharmaceutical products. The company's salt-making operation became a beta user of Informance Enterprise Solution to gain real-time visibility into the performance of specific plants, pieces of equipment, and product production operations across the enterprise, said Greg Joachims, Cargill's senior business unit program manager, during today's Webcast.
"We can look at specific equipment and understand its capacity ... and we can look at each individual site and make decisions on how well they are operating," Joachims explained. "The power comes from being able to look at groupings of products, equipment, and geographies so we can make true apples-to-apples comparisons."
Armed with consistent data, Joachims added, Cargill can begin to make informed decisions about where and how much to invest in performance improvements. Using the what-if analytical tools in Informance Enterprise Solution, for example, Cargill can see the impact of elevating a given plant to the OEE level of the company's best plant.
Cargill is one of three early beta users of Enterprise Solution, Bharadwaj said.
Informance Enterprise Solution will be generally available next Monday. The software can be deployed as a stand-alone tool, and does not require deployment of one of the Informance plant-level EMI products.