Global 500 Industrial Manufacturer Achieves High Productivity with Wonderware MES

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How hard is it to boost productivity?  Factors include training, equipment maintenance, operations tuning, effective material and inventory management.  This Fortune 500 Industrial turned to Wonderware for a MES solution that boosted their productivity by over 20% after use! 

Global 500 Industrial Achieves High OEE with Wonderware MES

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Along with equipment uptime, OEE is a measure of quality x available capacity x throughput--it's a measure that may vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but it's an indication of the efficiency and effectiveness of your plant maintenance and quality practices.

This global 500 industrial manufacturer turned to an OEE solution from Wonderware in order to achieve improvements of over 20%--a very significant measure that directly impacts profitability, capacity, and throughput of a plant.

Global 500 Industrial Manufacturer Gains Equipment Uptime Using Wonderware MES

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Equipment uptime management is a constant process of refinement and understanding of the dynamics behind stoppages.  Oftentimes paper-based systems are used to capture and manage downtime events.  However, not at this Fortune 500 Industrial--they use Wonderware MES in order to manage their downtime events, and achieved more than 20% improvement as a result!

Global 500 Industrial Achieves Significant Cost Reductions with Wonderware MES

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This Wonderware MES customer is a long time user of the solution, and their reported savings of more than 20% in cost improvements is a testimony to how MES can provide bottom-line results.

Medical Device Manufacturer Uses Wonderware MES

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Although Wonderware MES is well known for use in food and beverage and other consumer goods, we have a significant base of industrial, medical and discrete customers.  Here's one.

Beverage Company Gains More than 20% Quality Improvement Using Wonderware MES

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MES, or Manufacturing Execution Systems, are a great boon to companies wanting to improve productivity and operations.  A Wonderware beverage customer reported over a 20% improvement in quality using Wonderware MES solutions. That's ROI you can count on!

4 Stars for Wonderware MES by Global Food Company!

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This Global 500 Food Company gained enterprise integration into their SAP ERP, as well as using it as a trusted backup system in case the ERP goes down.

"Smooth and Reliable Operations" Says Customer Using Wonderware MES

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A Global 500 Industrial customer reports overall efficiencies in operations by using Wonderware MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) solutions.  Not only are operations and quality improved, but enterprise integration, bill of materials handling and costs reductions were gained using MES.
 

Repost, with comments: Survey: Feds sacrificing billions in savings by skipping cloud

This survey discussion posted in SmartBriefs highlights the cost savings being ignored by the government not using the cloud for application hosting and user access.  It states that up to $19 billion could be saved by migrating services and applications to the cloud--$19 billion! 

Of course you'd say, well that would be insane for anyone to not take advantage of the benefits.  But I suspect that education and awareness has a lot to do with the indecision and/or inactivity of not going to the cloud. Not all agencies can be that tech savvy.  And, there is still a slight stigma of security when it comes to the cloud.  Regardless of infrastructure (and I use Microsoft Azure as an example) for triple-redundancy for high availability and security, no one can guarantee fault-free operations. 

So let's look at manufacturing cloud adoption.  A survey by LNS Research, as published in Manufacturing.net last October, showed a slight bump in the anticipated use of the cloud for plant software--around 17% of the respondents intended to use (or consider).  I'd still say this is a small percentage, but it's progress.  The benefits and cost savings for ERP using a cloud SaaS, as defined by Hudson IT, show over $2M in savings over 3 years--extrapolate that to Industrial automation users, and you could still see over a $1M savings (assuming that large, complex industrial automation projects run 50% of the cost of an ERP).

Wonderware has been working with Microsoft for well over three years now to bring solutions and knowledge of the cloud to industry. What have we found?  Well, the cloud is the delivery mechanism--but what customers really want is to make reporting and analysis easier, more accessible, and cheaper.  That's what the cloud does.  Maybe we need to call it "hosted" or "hands off reporting" in order to remove the stigma of what the cloud is perceived to be.  In reality, it's a productivity tool that provides users with unrestricted use of solutions to help them manage and execute their operations. Applications such as #SmartGlance and #Historian Online bring mobile reporting and analysis.  Do you think we should just drop the word "cloud?"  Let me know.
maryanne.steidinger@schneider-electric.com.

Repost, with Comments: Top 5 BYOD Security Trends

The Information Security group on LinkedIn recently published a report that Mobile Enterprise covered, discussing the top 5 security trends around BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) security issues.

What was interesting in the survey was the lack of adoption in creating and enforcing BYOD policies within enterprises. The report states that only 20% of companies have a developed BYOD policy in place.  This is surprisingly low given the proliferance of devices, applications and solutions based upon mobile technology.  Notwithstanding the productivity increases (the study did state that the #1 trend was improved employee productivity/mobility/satisfaction)  there is still a reluctance to fully embrace and deploy mobile solutions.  Perhaps we as an industry need to jointly address security concerns?

Easier ERP to Operations Integration Using Wonderware MES

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Customer Case Study: Wonderware MES for Metals & Mining

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Repost, with Comments: Is your company allocating a larger portion of this year's budget to security spending?

http://www.smartbrief.com/poll/07/02/14/your-company-allocating-larger-portion-years-budget-security-spending

An interesting poll from SmartBriefs, touching on the investment indicators for security infrastructure within their readership. With only half of the respondents planning to increase spending for security measures, does this mean the industry's readiness to withstand attacks is completed?  Are companies ignoring additional threats?  Or have they previously invested in levels that provides them with the protection they need. These questions go unanswered.

For industrial automation, security is an ongoing issue, for as new products come into the plant, there are always additional threats that need to be addressed.  Invensys/Schneider Electric has done a good job at providing their customers with security counseling, best practice sharing, and project support.  Each year at our customer user group, we have sessions on cyber security that are packed.  Why?  Because customers want to understand what we as an industry, collectively, can do to ensure safe operations.  It's a partnership to share understanding, strategy and best practices.

For more on cyber security for industry, please visit our blog by security expert Doug Clifton.

Wonderware is "simpler to use" for advanced applications

Customer Proof verified by TechValidate.

We asked our Wonderware InTouch customers to tell us the benefits they've derived by using our software.  This testimony from a small professional services company underscores the ease of using Wonderware InBatch, InTouch and Historian when they all rely on a common platform, Wonderware System Platform.  See here for more information on how you can leverage the ease of installation and use.

Customers Improve OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) with Wonderware

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OEE--Overall Equipment Effectiveness--is a measurement of throughput, availability, and quality.  One solution to OEE is Wonderware Performance.  It gathers real time data from equipment and uses a dashboard to show status and efficiencies.

Wonderware Delivers Customers Improved Performance

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Why do customers use Wonderware? An important benefit is operational performance--reporting and analysis of the process, in real time.

Repost, from SmartBrief: Cloud Adoption

SmartPulse

Does your company continually embrace new cloud technologies?

No	54.55%
Yes	45.45%

#Wonderware and #Microsoft have been working together for over 3 years developing cloud-based solutions for productivity and operations. Yet this poll reflects what others are saying--that industry is not yet ready for the cloud. 

Why is that?  I think a number of factors are at play:

• The applications are too specific.  The cloud needs to take an entire factory's applications, and virtualize them.  Mix and match may be too difficult to maintain.
• The applications that are cloud-based may not solve the difficult problems.  Reporting is simple in the cloud, but reporting can be done in a variety of ways, and it may not be enough to go through the IT hurdles to get a cloud solution adopted.
• Education.  It still may not be apparent that either cloud solutions are available, or that they are relevant to a particular function, like plant-wide reporting.
• Security.  Companies are still reeling from security breaches such as StuxNet. Their IP is their lifeblood, and they aren't exposing it if solutions are available that do not have the same perceived risk.

On the other hand, the cloud is a tremendous boon to those companies that may not have the infrastructure, nor talent, to build and maintain applications such as plant reporting, plant data collection, plant intelligence. 

So it is up to us as an industry to continue to break down these barriers to adoption.  Education, success stories, finding the right markets--they all contribute to the proliferation of a solution that really helps industry scale, cost effectively, and easily adopt new technologies.

Customer Feedback: Customers Improve Quality Using Wonderware Software

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Wonderware customers were surveyed to see what percentage quality improvements they've made using Wonderware visualization, reporting and analysis software.  This testimonial shows sustained ROI as a result.