DOWNTIME AND OUTAGES ARE ERODING PROFITABILITY
Outages of HMI, support applications and database servers directly impact resourcing, cost management, delivery and quality. Crippling outages eat time and remove production from service. Avoid outages via virtualization technologies. The ROI on these deployments typically pay for themselves in the first year.
PRODUCTION REPORTING HAS GOT TO BE FASTER, MORE ACCURATE AND RELEVANT
Access to real-time, relevant data is a critical requirement to effective management and oversight of the plant. More than a list of items produced and variations thereof, reporting should have context and be actionable. The term is Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence enables predictive views of data throughout the production cycle to support better decision making and plant management. Once the information has been created, it needs to be available to the right people at the right time.
STAYING IN TOUCH WITH PRODUCTION WHEN NOT ON THE PLANT FLOOR
Historically, production managers have been tethered to the plant floor in order to have visibility into the status of the line, material inputs, operations personnel, maintenance and more. Today, however, there are more and more pressures that are pulling management away from production areas, as many organizations continually push the envelope for management personnel to do more with less. Layering in the efficiencies gained through the latest just-in-time processes, managers need to be in-tune with the production floor more than ever.
ISOLATED, CLOSED-SYSTEM PLANT INFRASTRUCTURE NO LONGER THE RULE
Historically, plant infrastructure systems have been isolated and closed. The prime directive was to protect the plant systems from any unnecessary forces which had the potential to impact uptime and productivity. Times have changed. Evolved market forces, production methods and technologies have resulted in a full reversal of this idea of the closed and un-touchable architecture as a business necessity.
1:1 COMPUTING RESOURCES = SINGLE POINTS OF FAILURE + UNDER-UTILIZED ASSETS + MANAGEMENT NIGHTMARE
The idea was simple, if you had a critical operation, then you created a dedicated environment to protect it. This sounded good over a decade ago, but we now see the failure of this approach. Organizations are spending significant resources (people and dollars) to manage what they have built and it is a daunting battle.