Connected Operations

Driving connectivity between the plant and the enterprise

As global expansion, customer demands, and competition reach new levels, the manufacturing industry is undergoing rapid changes that affect how your company does business. You and your people are under extreme pressure to increase operational efficiency, act on new business opportunities, lower operating costs, and boost profits.

Challenges such as finite shelf space, competition from retail brands, and closely monitored product turnover are driving a new level of competition in the industry. Even the smallest operational inefficiencies can translate into significant losses.

Microsoft works closely with a large ecosystem of plant-focused independent software vendors (ISVs) who use innovative Microsoft technology to build integration, collaboration, and analysis solutions for plant operations in the manufacturing industry. The solutions are designed to help your people perform to their fullest potential through a technology infrastructure that offers workflow and knowledge management tools to facilitate smooth collaboration among your people, ensuring that all the actions they take are also in line with your overall corporate goals.

Business Challenges

In today's challenging economy, true operational excellence can help your business reach a leadership position in the market, but maintaining this level can be frustratingly elusive. Operational excellence requires that your people be able to gather, analyze, and respond to vast amounts of production-related data in a short time, but most production management applications on the market simply cannot do this for you.

Your data must also be integrated with your higher-level systems, such as manufacturing execution systems (MES) and your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. For your people to add their own value to the systems, they must have the ability to organize plant data in the proper context. They need precise, specific information on what's necessary to drive optimum performance at the plant, in alignment with whatever your infrastructure or geographic boundaries may be. This information can allow them to better:

  • Meet competitive pressure to reduce real-time costs and address global supply chain needs.

  • Create a flexible and agile manufacturing operation that can adapt and respond to changes in the business, processes, supply chain partners, products, and markets.

  • Improve return on assets.

  • Track and address environmental, legal, regulatory, and community concerns.

  • Install technology to help fill personnel gaps as your skilled workforce ages and retires.

  • Help smooth supply chain operations, making them more lean and responsive to production needs.

Solutions

Manufacturing Plant Operations solutions based on Microsoft products and technologies can integrate real-time operational data with other enterprise information-seamlessly and intuitively-and transform it into actionable data. This connectivity enables manufacturers to improve production cycle times and output, monitor product quality and maintenance, and ultimately bring products to market faster.

Microsoft System Integrator partners, such as LogicaCMG, use their domain expertise to define and implement MES and manufacturing intelligence solutions that create the people-ready environment necessary to drive peak performance at your plant.

Using Microsoft collaboration technology-such as Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting-ISV partner solutions can help you drive peak performance at your plant with real-time collaboration and put data in proper context for your people.

Core pillars

Microsoft offers a technology platform that delivers on three core pillars:

  • Integration: Microsoft has a large ecosystem of partners that offer your people collaborative manufacturing solutions, enable visibility into optimal performance across the plant, and integrate your data with your high-level systems, including your ERP system.

  • Collaboration: Microsoft partners develop platforms that provide precise, specific information to help your people achieve peak performance at the plant, whatever infrastructure and geographic boundaries may seem to exist. Flexible collaboration capabilities are also crucial across the supply chain to facilitate a more agile business model, including capabilities for outsourcing. Flexible collaboration capabilities can even help with customer relations by giving customers some visibility into the production status of their orders.

  • Analytics: Using innovative Microsoft software, solutions from Microsoft ISVs can provide your people with the basic foundations for data management, visibility into plant operations, and ways to organize your plant data in the proper context, enabling your employees to add value of their own.

Core solution areas

  1. Manufacturing visibility

    Microsoft technology enables your people in operations to take advantage of:

    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 w

      ith context (the 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 by having a single source of similar data feeding into several systems instead of manually entering data into these systems.

  2. Manufacturing execution systems (MES)

    As the platform of choice of the top MES ISVs (including GE Fanuc, Siemens, Rockwell, Camstar, Invensys, Apriso, OSIsoft, and AspenTech), Microsoft enables manufacturing teams to:

    • Simplify reporting and reduce costs.

    • Share required information freely to quickly and accurately develop new products.

    • Utilize powerful project management tools integrated into back-office systems.

    • Use Microsoft products that are built into a proven platform and that feature a user-centric toolset, including Microsoft Office Visio, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Project, Microsoft Office Word, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

  3. Manufacturing control systems (MCS)

    Microsoft and our MCS partners enable your people to effectively control their operations and integrate these systems with the MES required to efficiently run the manufacturing operations.

    MCS enable your people to develop the discrete logic, batch control, and continuous process loops required to control the facility, while easily sharing the appropriate information with the MES and manufacturing visibility systems required to run production. This is all done using innovative and easy-to-use Microsoft tools. Global ISVs that sell top distributed control systems or MCS include Invensys, Honeywell, ABB, Rockwell, GE Fanuc, Siemens, Yokogawa, and Citect.

  4. Manufacturing ERP

    Microsoft helps minimize the cost of powerful manufacturing ERP solutions. Whether Microsoft is the underlying technology supporting your SAP implementation or the provider of your fully functional ERP solutions, using Microsoft-based technology will significantly lower the cost of your ERP implementations.