Now more than ever, manufacturing leaders are challenged to balance a multitude of competing priorities. This is especially true among those companies in the food, beverage, or consumer goods industries. Raw materials and energy costs are rising; customers increasingly demand just-in-time order fulfillment; and lower-cost competitors are entering the market with lean, direct-to-consumer production capabilities.

Although many manufacturers have invested significantly in automation solutions—HMI/ SCADA control networks, MES/MOM and ERP/MRP applications, and database historians—most manufacturing information systems exist as disparate data silos. Production managers must frequently employ a piecemeal combination of spreadsheets and paper reports to derive basic manufacturing performance metrics.

With each process that gets “bolted on” to your information system, there is an opportunity for failure. Simple process changes can cause critical data flows to fail, and their manually-intensive nature severely limits business agility and scale.