There's a new name in manufacturing intelligence: Acumence Inc.
The Chicago-based company, which has kept a low profile since its 1997 inception as a custom systems integrator, yesterday unveiled an updated manufacturing intelligence offering that includes key performance indicator (KPI) alerts which provide operations management with elevated plant floor visibility through a customizable dashboard.
Previously known as Visibility Systems, the company changed its name to Acumence earlier this year when it brought in new management to oversee its transition to a product company. With Version 5.5 of its Manufacturing Business Intelligence Solution, Acumence has beefed up its Plant Analytics Server, which is considered by one research firm as the company's major differentiator in the manufacturing intelligence space.
According to a research brief written by Aberdeen Group, the Acumence Plant Analytics Server unifies data from multiple process control systems into a single contextual database that captures, preprocesses, and transforms real-time data into intelligible information that can be used by other systems.
In essence, the server "... provides a [higher] level of visibility into production operations," said David Brochu, who joined Acumence earlier this year as its first vice president of sales and marketing. "A lot of software packages can take data, massage it, put it on the screen, and make it useful. The difference is we have a thing in the middle called the Plant Analytics Server that is not just taking data raw and putting it on the screen, but it is [monitoring] processes and counting and measuring performance indicators."
Similarly, other manufacturing intelligence vendors such as ActivPlant and SAP's Lighthammer rely on KPIs to offer visibility into plant floor activity. But part of the Acumence story is "how they are using dashboards at the operating level," said Jane Biddle, vice president of manufacturing at Aberdeen, in an interview with Managing Automation.
Version 5.5's dashboard improvements make it easier to locate root causes of decreasing performance. Enhanced reporting with analytical drill-down capabilities, as well as the ability to capture process variables such as machine speeds, temperatures, and pressures, allows the Plant Analytics Server to closely monitor plant operations.
The software contains an alerting engine that can be customized to notify the right person at the right time through the dashboard. Other features in Version 5.5 include a trend chart for real-time and historical analysis, dashboard designer with easy-to-configure objects, and the ability to export reports to Microsoft Excel or Adobe PDF formats.
While this latest version -- which can cost upwards of $100,000 for a large, multi-machine plant -- focuses heavily on KPIs and performance measures, the next version, to be released in mid-2006, will take an enterprise approach. "The direction of the company is to focus on the strategies of [the manufacturer's] enterprise as well as the plant and goals and objectives of each line, shift, operator, or work order," Brochu said in an interview with Managing Automation.
Acumence currently has a handful of customers; among its largest is beverage-can manufacturer Rexam PLC, Managing Automation's 2005 Progressive Manufacturer Award winner in the customer mastery category.
Acumence's relationship with Rexam could help give it the industry credibility it needs to gain traction with customers and other enterprise and automation vendors, Aberdeen's Biddle said. "They haven't really come out of nowhere," she noted. "It is just that they are a small company and they've been doing a lot of work with this one company, Rexam, which has helped define who they are."