The manufacturing industry and its traditional methods face tremendous competitive challenges now posed by the rapid increase of global expansion and new customer demands. Companies are under extreme pressure to increase operational efficiency, act on new business opportunities, reduce operating costs, and boost profits.
To help manufacturers survive under these conditions, Microsoft provides its Connected Operations solutions which use specialized technologies to improve integration, collaboration, and analysis for plant operations in the manufacturing industry. Created in conjunction with a large ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs), these solutions help companies perform to their fullest potential. They are based on a technology infrastructure that offers workflow and knowledge management, and include the necessary tools to facilitate smooth cross-team collaboration and focus operational activities on achieving overall corporate goals.
Business Challenges
To achieve and maintain market leadership in a challenging economy, manufacturers must achieve and maintain operational excellence. You need the capability to rapidly gather, analyze, and respond to vast amounts of production-related data. This data must be integrated with your higher-level systems, such as manufacturing execution systems (MES) and your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. And your people must have the ability to organize this plant data in the context of their particular process needs. All of this requires precise, instant delivery of specific information – as needed for optimum plant performance within any infrastructure or geographic boundary. Operational excellence allows companies to ...
- Address global supply chain needs and meet competitive pressure.
- Create a flexible and agile manufacturing operation.
- Adapt and respond to changing industry, processes, partners, products, and markets.
- Reduce real-time costs and improve return on assets.
- Track and address environmental, legal, regulatory, and community concerns.
- Respond to skill gaps as the more experienced workforce ages and retires.
- Transform supply chain operations to become more lean and flexible.
Solutions
Connected Operations solutions, provided in conjunction with our System Integrator Vendor (ISV) partners, are built upon Microsoft products and technologies. They provide seamless, intuitive integration of real-time operational data with other enterprise information – and transform it into actionable information. This connectivity enables manufacturers to improve production cycle times and output, monitor product quality and maintenance, and ultimately bring products to market faster. Helping to deliver data in proper context and drive peak plant performance, these ISV partner solutions can provide real-time collaboration with the full suite of familiar, proven Microsoft technology products.
MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEMS (MES)
As the platform of choice for leading MES ISVs, Microsoft technology enables manufacturing teams to simplify reporting and reduce costs while freely sharing required information to quickly and accurately develop new products. MES also apply powerful project management tools which are already integrated into the back-office systems all on a proven platform that integrates the user-familiar Microsoft Office suite
MANUFACTURING CONTROL SYSTEMS (MCS)
MCS solutions provide more effective operational control and integrate with the MES as needed for overall efficiency of manufacturing operations. Built upon innovative and easy-to-use Microsoft technologies, these solutions support the development of discrete logic, batch control, and continuous process loops required to control the facility – while easily sharing operational information with the MES and manufacturing visibility systems .
MANUFACTURING VISIBILITY
Connected Operations solutions from Microsoft support collaboration, analytics, and integration.
Collaboration
- Deliver information quickly to the people who need it, when they need it, filtered for their specific roles. Also, allow people to cooperate as they respond to certain events in real time.
- Improve productivity and return on assets with full visibility across processes, lines, departments, plants, and outsourced operations and throughout the global supply network.
Analytics
Use real-time production information to feed third-party products and/or Microsoft SQL Server analytics to:
- Drive production efficiency by modeling past, present, and future plant performance.
- Provide industry-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks, and monitor KPIs in a portal, in Web or desktop applications, or even in a Windows Vista gadget in real time.
Integration
Utilize technologies inside and outside of the plant and integrate real-time plant floor systems with manufacturing execution systems, inventory, laboratory, business transaction ERP systems, and so on to help your people:
- Ensure that all appropriate data comes together for a view with context
(Heterogeneous integration platform supports open industry standards, such as ISA 95 and OAGIS). - Facilitate traceability that identifies every action taken for a specific component for a particular order.
- Improve accuracy via single source of similar data feeding into several systems instead of manually entering data into these systems.
MANUFACTURING ERP
Microsoft helps minimize the cost of large manufacturing ERP solutions. Whether Microsoft simply provides the underlying technology to support your ERP system or is the primary provider of your entire full-function ERP solutions, Microsoft-based technology can significantly lower the cost of your ERP implementations.