Thursday, December 20, 2012

Enhance the Performance of Business with Mobile Dashboard

Mobile Business Intelligence has become a trend setter in the market of Business Intelligence or BI. The past years have seen solution providers placing considerable efforts for the development of mobile applications that are interactive and can be useful for the decision makers who are always on the move. Although the trend in this regard was slow to pick up, mobile BI has started making inroads into general practices of business in the marketplace. Almost every business entity has understood the various benefits offered by using mobile dashboards as information providers for the success of any business activity.

Mobile business intelligence is just one of the trends in the huge market of business intelligence. There are numerous other trends that are emerging in this regard that affect the overall adoption of the concept for use. With the advancements in technology and the widespread acceptance of iPhones, iPads, tablets and Androids, the different vendors are now able to render various business intelligence offerings that permit the companies in providing enhanced information and analytics access to the executives who are out of office for most of the time.

The market of business intelligence has seen slow expansion for including mobile dashboard. With the years spent in accessing important data in the form of PDF files, executives are now attracted to the ease of using the mobile applications for accessing vital information. The interactive dashboards in mobiles provide parameterized reports, and businesses are now deploying the concept of mobile BI as a key element in the functions of their work. All this means that the offerings of mobiles have reached a stage where they are able to meet diverse requirements of business intelligence in regards to ease of interaction and use. With the advent of iPads and tablets, the use of mobile BI has become the preferred choice of businesses across the globe. Not only is this concept able to provide enjoyment, the ease of accessing vital company and client information is a major booster for the executives. All this has resulted in the vendors trying to place their efforts in expansion of the concept with enhanced applications.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Blog Posts and Industrial Automation's Role in Making Food Safe

Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Blog Posts

Maintaining the safety of our food supply is not just the government's job--we as vendors to that industry also have a duty to provide products that make it easier and more efficient to tell when processes are diverging or failing; giving processors the visibility into their supply chain, to more efficiently detect when variances to critical quality levels occur; and most importantly, prevent the inclusion of defective products into the distribution channel.

We see the most challenging aspect of food safety is convincing the smallish companies that comprise the bulk of the industry to invest in technologies that will make their operations safer and consequently the output safer as well.  When companies are mostly manual, to add more sophisticated software (other than Microsoft Excel) becomes burdensome.  They don't have the IT resources necessary to even upkeep such a system.  So we as an industry need to make products that make it easier to use, cheaper to acquire, and more intuitive to manage.  

I've written a lot about the cloud--this is an ideal instance of where it could help these smaller providers.  Buying MES software as a service could defray costs, limit IT burden, and make it more accessible to these smaller companies.  I think it's only a matter of time.  We have already seen Historians on the cloud from a number of vendors (in addition to Invensys who was one of the first) within the past year.  Can a low cost, easy to use, MES be far behind?

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Mobile Dashboards Provide the Much Needed ease for Monitoring Vital Information

Mobile business intelligence has introduced latest and new considerations on how the various organizations are monitoring their Key Performance indicators (KPI's) and such other metrics. A recently conducted study has claimed that by the year 2013, almost one-third of the users of BI will start accessing mobile dashboards for decision making concerns and analyzing important information. This is proof that mobile business intelligence is fast catching on. The concept has started to utilize the methods which the community of BI was predicting for some years now.

The challenge involved in the designing of mobile dashboard for BI users rests in the provision of important and relevant content that can be easily obtained and processed with the use of mobile devices. The on-premise or traditional desktop solutions for BI are great ways for providing the users with dashboards that are content-rich by way of visualizing a wide range of KPI's and such other vital metrics. It should be understood that the mobile dashboards need not compete with the traditional dashboards or desktop BI; they need to compliment the solutions provided by the desktop dashboards by the provision of KPI access from anywhere and at any given time.

The consumer culture demands the mobile applications to be friendly for the users, simple in nature, and fast in processing. These are the lessons that the organizations and users of BI need to remember after they have spent precious time, money and effort for deployment of solutions of mobile dashboards. The vendor of dashboards and BI need to stay up to delivering solutions and match the hype created by the mobile BI applications.

What does the Invensys acquisition mean for Spiral?

What does the Invensys acquisition mean for Spiral?

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Business Intelligence iPad is Proving Beneficial for Businesses with Its Applications

Mobile business intelligence has come a long way from the usual boardroom or back office stuff to the latest trends of tablets. Decisions regarding office work are usually made on roads, warehouses, during client meets or the airport lounges. Decision makers usually need to have quick access for the key metrics, and this is facilitated by the mobile devices. The business intelligence iPad has made the lives of executives easier with its applications. The use of such devices reduces the decision bottlenecks, and increases the performance of the business process, thus enabling broader inputs in the decisions in hand.

The proliferation of business intelligence iPad is actually making Mobile BI a success by putting the data in the hands of the decision makers. The most obvious benefit derived by the use of these devices is not the coolness factor alone; the ability of delivering information literally at the fingertips of executives is the best part.

The convenience factor is also important in this regard. In the initial days, the executives needed to fetch the required information from their assistants; however with the advent of Mobile business intelligence, they have become self-sufficient in this regard. They also need not be tech savvy for using the devices. With such great advantages, Mobile BI is here to stay for long.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Adding Quality to Your Manufacturing Execution System


Quality test execution is a logical part of a MES
By Michael Schwarz, Product Marketing Manager, MES/EMI, Invensys.

Quality management is a functional domain which is typically and traditionally already covered with significant investment in any enterprise. Quality Management Systems (QMS) are present to a higher degree, in comparison with production or manufacturing related systems like Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) or process automation.

 What do Quality Management Systems do? They include managing a process according to target/specifications, maintaining real-time quality documentation; coordinate and monitor nonconformance recalls; and tie-in customer complaints to the manufacturing process, all within the context of a manufacturing process.