Acumence: Manufacturing Business Intelligence Solution

By Control Engineering Staff January 12, 2006

Manufacturing Business Intelligence Solution version 5.5. from Acumence Inc . offers new KPIs alerting and plant analytics server enhancements that help manufacturers more quickly: identify, analyze, and react to decreasing plant performance.

For operators of high-speed, high-volume manufacturing processes, this means less scrap and greater efficiency. Improvements in the dashboards allow visualization of location and root cause of decreasing performance. And enhanced reports, with analytical drilldown capabilities, provide detailed analysis on-the-fly. New features of the plant analytics server enhance retrieval of complex queries, and make the solution easier to use and maintain, thereby lowering total cost of ownership, but also making valuable performance information more widely available throughout the plant, and throughout the enterprise.

Version 5.5 provides for full, high-resolution capture of process variables such as machine speeds, temperatures, and pressures. Performance measures, or real-time KPIs, are fully configurable and integrated into the server. And when conditions change, the new, complex alerting engine will notify the right person, at the right time.

Plant Analytics Server also provides a high-performance user experience. Dashboards in version 5.5 provide immediate status-of-plant operations, and reports and analysis tools allow for quick drill-down diagnosis to uncover the root-cause of a problem, so normal production resumes more quickly. New features and enhancements also include:  • Downtime Gant chart—new object graphs the state of multiple machines over time, allowing for quick identification of cause-and-effect relationships between machines and line flow efficiency losses.

  • Trend chart—new object plots any number of process variables, KPIs, speeds or variables on a chart for real-time and historical analysis.

  • Dashboard Designer—a new environment with easy-to configure objects provides flexibility with ease of use, for a lower cost of ownership.

  • Export reports—with one click of a button you can export report data to Microsoft Excel or Adobe PDF formats.

—David Greenfield, editorial director, Control Engineering dgreenfield@reedbusiness.com