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Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence: A Room with a View
 Every morning, senior managers at Valero Energy Corp. gather in the company's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) for a daily operations call to each of the company's 15 refineries in the United States, Canada and Aruba.
In the room-outfitted with 23 46-inch monitors surrounding a central, 8-foot by 14-foot media wall–Valero executives are able to call up and manipulate a variety of colorful dashboards detailing vital, real-time operating statistics on each of the 15 sites. In rapid succession, spending less than 60 seconds per plant, managers can get a visual snapshot of the operational status of each refinery.
It's a capability that greatly facilitates management's charge to continuously optimize the performance of the refineries, and of the San Antonio-based company as a whole. And it's a far cry from the procedure required less than a year ago, when the review of each plant's operations involved a combination of hard-copy reports, on-screen Excel spreadsheets and other manual methods, says Glenn Stokes, Information Systems manager, refining systems, at Valero. “The day we finished our implementation and turned on all 15 of these dashboards in the EOC at the end of June 2008, it forever changed the way that these morning operations calls to the plants are conducted,” Stokes observes... Read more
Plant Floor Intelligence: Digging for Dollars
By providing improved visibility of plant floor data, enterprise manufacturing intelligence software enables smarter decisions that yield bottom-line results.
“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
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... Read more
Information A Strategic Driver For Sustainable Growth
Unilever discovers that product lifecycle management implementation propels it to customer award-winning performance.
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies–particularly manufacturers of foods, beverages and other products whose brands are recognized throughout the world–face increasing challenges in today 's market. John Blanchard, principal analyst at ARC Advisory Group Inc., in Dedham, Mass., says that knowledge... Read more |
