There’s a plethora of industrial software applications now
available from a variety of vendors, both small, point-solutions based
companies to the larger, all-in-one industrial automation vendors. They offer everything from development
environments through IT solutions. But
if you look at your critical needs, it comes down to using 5 applications:
Data is everywhere—lurking in our inboxes; languishing in
our plant databases; and lingering in BI tools and analytics meant to provide
insight, and intelligence to our everyday tasks. Long ago I did an analysis of how many plant
floor software applications a typical large manufacturing plant had—and it was
well over 50. This included legacy,
custom, and commercial off-the-shelf applications for a variety of operations,
from quality to production to maintenance.
That’s a lot of data hiding in a lot of applications.
It’s logical to think that this data can be used for more
than the sum of its parts—and that’s the foundation for products such as Enterprise
Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI). EMI puts real-time and near-real time
transactional or plant data into context or relationships with one another,
allowing users to define Key Performance Indicators that can be measured (or
quantified) and monitored. Think of
quality by shift, energy usage by plant.
But is there more?
I recently attended the Cloud Channel Summit in Silicon
Valley. The attendees represented
leading software, hardware, systems and cloud hosting providers, as well as
their channel—distributors, value-added resellers, systems integrators. Billed
as a networking event to help build strategic alliances for a #cloud offering,
it was apparent that the “cloud” and its ecosystem are still very much in a
developmental stage.
