of pulling together all of that information off the production floor and then looking at how to format it, verify it and then send it on up to the enterprise.”

Quick returns

In today’s difficult economic environment, the time may be right for EMI, say proponents and industry watchers alike. AMR Research Director Simon Jacobson pegs EMI as one of the fastest growing segments in the overall $6 billion market for manufacturing operations software. “Even in a down economy, a lot of companies in this [EMI] space are seeing significant traction,” he observes.

{mosimage} As plants shut down and companies cut back on capital spending, EMI investments can pay off by providing the visibility needed to boost performance of existing plants and assets, Jacobson notes. And the return on investment (ROI) for an EMI project can be rapid, he says, ranging from 1X to 5X per year for a “tactical OEE” investment at a single plant, up to the 10X range for EMI applications in which “you look across a fleet of plants or assets.”

Vendors tell a similar story. Vivek Bapat, an SAP vice president, says that payback typically comes within three to five months for users of his company’s MII product. And Doug Lawson, president at Rockwell Incuity, says that “increasingly, we have good case studies that we can show to customers where the product pays for itself well within a year.”

In some cases, a single discovery that would otherwise have gone unnoticed—such as bottleneck in a production line, a product going out of a specification, or a pipe that was about to burst—can produce near instantaneous EMI payback, various vendors point out. “The ROI can be phenomenal, because you’re making previously undiscovered or invisible information visible,” says Wonderware’s Steidinger.

“The cool thing about EMI is that it’s low risk,” adds Aspentech’s Smith. “You’re not actually changing the process. You’re just watching the process,” she says. “And the payback is great. As much as I love MES systems, these [EMI] things pay off a lot faster than MES does, I’ll tell you that,” Smith concludes.

Related Sidebar - A Room with a View
To read the article accompanying this story, go to www.automationworld.com/feature-5368.

Related Sidebar - EMI Down Under
To read the article accompanying this story, go to www.automationworld.com/feature-5369.

Subscribe to Automation World's RSS Feeds for Feature Articles