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CASE STUDY
Steel Producer Improves Product Quality with Manufacturing Intelligence Software
By pulling together data that had been isolated in multiple systems, FactoryTalk® VantagePoint from Rockwell Automation allows a leading steel producer to improve quality by increasing visibility, correlating potential defects and customizing reporting.
Manufacturers are beset on all sides with increasing external pressures—volatile customer demands, growing regulatory oversight, sustainability requirements—while inside their own organizations they are being asked to slice costs and improve profitability. To be successful, manufacturers must learn to leverage data that is often fragmented into islands around the enterprise. On each island workers can operate their systems—whether programmable controllers, inventory management or LIMS, e.g.—and they can focus on appropriate KPIs for their function. An operator can monitor throughput and cycle time. Maintenance can monitor performance and works to predict—and prevent—downtime.
While these islands allow people to do their jobs, improving the manufacturing process as a whole has been more challenging. Why? Most plants are comprised of capital equipment, software and infrastructure from different generations and different vendors, and communication between functional areas has been difficult to achieve... Read more
TECH OVERVIEW UPM Turns Data into Information
The Unified Production Model (UPM) for FactoryTalk® VantagePoint from Rockwell Automation provides a data bank for disparate systems, with out-of-the-box functionality for KPIs, dashboards and reports.
The key to a successful manufacturing intelligence program is to take a systematic approach to building infrastructure, one that will provides visibility into every corner of the plant. The Unified Production Model (UPM), on which FactoryTalk Vantage Point from Rockwell Software provides that insight, organizes data from across the enterprise into information that is more meaningful, prompting better decision-making across the organization. What's more, it does so by leveraging technology and systems already in the plant.
“We allow the data to be the master in whatever system—and on whatever brands—exist in a plant,” says John Theron, product manager, Rockwell Software. “FactoryTalk VantagePoint interrogates all the data sources on the floor that we can expose to the model, and the UPM continually refreshes, arming users with the most up-to-date information available while the original data remains at its source” ... Read more
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Software Provides Unified View of Disparate Manufacturing Data 