"This is a money digging world of ours; and, as it is said, 'there are more ways than one to skin a cat,' so are there more ways than one of digging for money."

-From "Way down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life, " by Seba Smith, 1854

{mosimage} Nineteenth-century American humorist and author Seba Smith was certainly not writing about manufacturing software when he penned the words above. Nonetheless, modern practitioners of so-called enterprise manufacturing intelligence, or EMI, software are in many ways “digging for money,” when they use the technology to drill down into their factory or plant data in search of better insights.

EMI solutions are designed to extract and aggregate real-time manufacturing data from many disparate sources on the factory floor. Then, by merging and contextualizing this data together with enterprise transactional data, and presenting information via role-based graphical dashboards and other methods, EMI can enable users to track key performance indicators (KPIs), see relationships that were previously opaque, and drill down to find answers to specific questions. The resulting visibility can help users at all levels—from plant floor operators through plant management to top-level executives—to make smarter decisions that can drive results straight to a company’s bottom line.

In fact, the payoffs from the effective use of EMI software can be handsome indeed. And just as with skinning a cat, there are a multitude of ways in which the digging can be accomplished, and a plethora of vendor tools that can be deployed.

Consider the case of Valero Energy Corp., San Antonio. By using EMI software to provide better real-time visibility into the way that its 15 refineries in the United States, Canada and Aruba are using steam, electricity and fuel gas, Valero expects to significantly improve energy management across all 15 sites. So much so, in fact, that the company projects annual savings of $4 million to $12 million per plant. That’s a minimum of $60 million per year. To achieve these results, Valero selected an EMI product called Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII), from SAP AG, the Walldorf, Germany-based enterprise software supplier.

Or look at Hexion Specialty Chemicals Inc., a Columbus, Ohio-based company that is the world’s largest producer of thermosetting resins and formaldehyde, with more than 100 plants globally. When Hexion began trying out EMI software at individual plants, one of the first plants to use the technology discovered savings totaling about $300,000 in the first year, spurring the company to ramp up deployment of EMI in a series of multi-plant rollouts. The product in use: EMI software from Incuity Software, of Mission Viejo, Calif., now part of automation supplier Rockwell Automation Inc., Milwaukee, which acquired Incuity last May.

{mosimage} Likewise, at Sage Automation Ltd., Australia’s largest system integrator, Team Manager for Manufacturing Intelligence Damian Jolly, in Adelaide, is excited about the benefits that EMI is bringing to one of its customers—a major Australian beverage bottler. Based on earlier experience at the plant level, EMI software will enable a boost of 3 percent to 5 percent in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) at each of the bottler’s eight plants in Australia and New Zealand during the next two years, saving significant money, Jolly reckons. And by adding another layer atop the plant-level EMI to aggregate and distribute that data at the enterprise level, more benefits will accrue, says Jolly. “We’re certainly looking at payback within the year.”

For the bottler application, Sage is using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution from myDials, of Lafayette, Colo., to handle the roll-up of data from the individual plants for use at the enterprise level, Jolly says. At the plant level, an EMI product known as Throughput Analyzer, supplied by Activplant Corp., of London, Ontario, Canada, delivers the site level intelligence.

Fantastic info

With a server at every bottling plant, the Activplant software provides “fantastic information and manufacturing KPIs to drive process improvement initiatives at the factory level,” Jolly observes. But due in part to reliability questions surrounding Australia’s wide area network infrastructure, Sage selected the SaaS-based myDials solution to connect the data to the next level, says Jolly. “All of these plants have good Internet access, so it really solved the journey of distance, of moving data between sites,” he explains.

{mosimage} MyDials, which can gather and aggregate data from a large variety of both enterprise and operational data sources, including Activplant, presents information in easy-to-read, interactive dashboards. This enables management at the bottler to make plant-to-plant comparisons on a variety of metrics, using only a Web browser ...