Achieving Real-Time Performance Management in Manufacturing Operations with Microsoft and OSIsoft
Companies in the chemicals, gas, and oil industries are all trying to increase visibility into the performance of their plants. The question is, how do they do it?
They all collect data from their manufacturing processes with varying degrees of sophistication and fidelity, and there is no shortage of solutions, purchased or developed, to analyze it. But there are problems with the data collected, and the analysis always seems to fall short.
Manufacturers are either drowning in the sheer volume of real-time data or struggling to make sense of inconsistent data gathered from a variety of disparate applications or from multiple manufacturing facilities. Most have approached high-fidelity data collection using time-based historians, which have not been able to scale or knit this diverse data into an enterprise perspective. Many members of the Microsoft Manufacturing Users Group (a community of manufacturing organizations that use Microsoft solutions) confirm these obstacles.
To address these considerable challenges, however, some manufacturers have implemented the PI System from OSIsoft, which offers a real-time performance management infrastructure. OSIsoft provides an enterprise repository for operational data from over 500 different sources (that in 64-bit operations can scale up to 21 million data points), including from such enterprise resource planning systems as SAP and Oracle.
In addition, OSIsoft provides a unique software-plus-services offering, Managed PI, that remotely handles deployment, operations, and maintenance of the PI infrastructure at the customer's site. OSIsoft uses Web-based software to gather performance data from PI Systems at customer sites. A central network operating center monitors and maintains this system to maximize its reliability. Customers who choose to enter into an enterprise agreement with OSIsoft also get the advantages of project rollout support and the ability to draw on best practices from deep industry expertise in the OSIsoft Center of Excellence.
Once the data infrastructure is established, manufacturers then use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Excel, and PerformancePoint Server 2007 to produce from the data dynamic real-time plant floor reports and key performance indicators that any plant employee can view within the familiar Microsoft Office interface.
OSIsoft is working with Microsoft to help chemical companies further leverage their IT investments to deliver greater intelligence from the data they collect. To this end, OSIsoft is exploring:
| • | Stronger integration with the Microsoft Office platform to enable the creation of dynamic plant-floor Office Business Applications to give companies more ways to expose real-time data and events. Systems integrators can then work with manufacturers to develop applications that solve the special problems unique to each business. |
| • | Integration with Microsoft PerformancePoint for deeper business intelligence capabilities. This would enable manufacturers to use a scorecard (or dashboard) approach that puts real-time data gathered from the PI System into the context of key performance indicators. Ultimately, companies will use that data for planning and to run "what-if" scenarios. |
| • | Use of the SharePoint Business Data Catalog to enable companies to pull real-time contextual data from line-of-business applications such as SAP into a SharePoint search, further connecting companies to their manufacturing environments. |
The OSIsoft solution has already helped companies achieve real-time performance management. For example, the PI System enabled the Brazil corn processing plant of one of the 20 largest companies in the U.S. to access historical plant data. By leveraging Microsoft capabilities, the company was able to display trends and monitor plant processes in a way that had been difficult before the PI System was installed. By observing performance trends and comparing them with historical data, "PI helped us to determine where we were failing and what we could do to improve," says the plant manager. Ultimately, it's about the product: "I think the real value of PI is in helping us to detect problems, develop our process, and solve problems so we can grind more corn." As a result, he goes on to say, "Today I am running our plant at more than one hundred percent of projected capacity."
More Info
Find out how you can use the OSIsoft PI System to gather real-time data from diverse sources and use Microsoft products to view and analyze the data, thereby achieving real-time performance management.
