an overload. “If people have no information about their impact, they’ll still do their jobs,” he says, “though they may or may not have a clue about what to do better. On the other hand, if too much performance management data is handed to them, their eyes may glaze over. They’ll end up not knowing what they’re looking at. It’s often better to have less information than too much.”

The upshot is that, with interoperability in full swing, data reduction systems such as performance dashboards or trend displays must boil down ever-increasing data flows from ever-wider ranges of devices, controls and systems. Wonderware offers a set of precepts for integration that give some insight not only for tying elements together but also for data reduction:

o Don’t speak of technology before speaking of business processes

o Define the border—and overlaps—between MES and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems

o Determine who owns what data, especially master data, recipes and other key manufacturing requirements

o Determine the best source of information

o Work out data transformations between ERP and shop floor, translating temperatures, levels, speeds, work orders into customer orders, costs, delivery dates, performance indicators.

Once system borders, information sources and data owners are clear, performance management indicators can be defined across the board.

Bauer says, “We are seeing an evolution, with plant information systems that are more comprehensive than anything up to now. We’re starting to see very high-level integration frameworks being seriously considered for plant-wide information systems. It’s an excellent opportunity for an SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach, where there’s a single flow of data, a single version of the truth, if you will. From this single flow, information can be extracted and sent to each functional area that needs it.”

Tock suggests that the primary performance management data objective is awareness of and control over asset utilization. “Many large companies are well on the path of making any product, anywhere. The key is to get everyone in synch with consistent data. If you have four plants, one in the United States, one in Europe, one in South America and one in China, critical concepts, such as capacity, overall efficiency, distribution and labor costs—all these have to be defined the same way.”

In the final analysis, interoperability results in software, departments and systems that work together. The growing enhancements to interoperability of standards and open technical platforms offer top-to-bottom data flows that—intelligently abstracted and reduced into key indicators—offer new capabilities, not just to operations, but to performance management needs as well.

For more information, search keywords “interoperability” and “performance management” at www.automationworld.com.