Visibility Beyond the Plant Floor

March 6, 2015
Dassault Systèmes adds maintenance, logistics, and warehouse capabilities to its manufacturing intelligence application suite.

Recognizing the need to collect operational insight beyond the factory floor, Dassault Systèmes this week introduced a new version of its Delmia Apriso Manufacturing Process Intelligence (MPI) application suite that extends visibility to over 200 new key performance indicators (KPIs).

MPI 4.0 adds metrics for maintenance, logistics, and the warehouse, in addition to the existing production, machine, time and labor, and quality analytics and reports. The software comes in the form of pre-configured intelligence packs that provide built-in metrics to measure nearly any type of operational KPI. With all seven intelligence packs, MPI 4.0 now delivers over 700 pre-configured measurements.

The importance of the intelligence packs comes down to ease-of-use and depth of coverage, Dassault officials say. “Standardized KPIs provide a baseline for improved maintenance, logistics, and warehouse performance reporting, for example, that can be leveraged across locations on a global, enterprise-wide scale,” says Tuan Nguyen, Delmia Apriso senior product manager. “This means a KPI can be defined just once, and is then reported the same across all plants. Measures can be rolled up to provide global visibility while at the same time supporting the ability to drill-down into individual plants to enable cross-plant comparisons and benchmarking.”

Collecting more real-time data accelerates decision support and improves operational performance and agility that can enhance continuous process improvement on a global scale, the company says. In addition, the three new intelligence packs also improve product traceability and root-cause analysis.

The new maintenance intelligence pack delivers visibility into all aspects of maintenance efficiency and productivity, including mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), spare parts usage, and more. It helps ensure equipment is operating at full capacity while minimizing the likelihood of unplanned downtime.

The logistics intelligence pack provides detailed information on materials flow and logistics, enabling enterprises to expose inefficiencies quickly in the supply chain to improve overall manufacturing performance.

And, the warehouse intelligence pack delivers ready-to-use reporting and analytics covering indicators such as inventory accuracy, warehouse utilization, and response time reporting.

The existing intelligence packs include:

Production - reporting and analytics that cover over 200 indicators, such as order adherence, operation duration, and first pass yield reporting.

Machine - covering indicators such as OEE, cycle time performance and Good-Scrap-Failed reporting.

Time and labor - indicators such as overall labor efficiency, labor per product and employee productivity reporting.

Quality - standardized defect, inspection, containment and supplier analysis and reporting capabilities to shorten the time required and resources necessary to solve product and process quality challenges.

The MPI application, which works with Microsoft Excel and other business intelligence reporting tools, including SAP Business Objects and Crystal Reports, is delivered as a completely integrated enterprise manufacturing intelligence suite or as an enhancement to existing manufacturing execution systems (MES).

About the Author

Stephanie Neil | Editor-in-Chief, OEM Magazine

Stephanie Neil has been reporting on business and technology for over 25 years and was named Editor-in-Chief of OEM magazine in 2018. She began her journalism career as a beat reporter for eWeek, a technology newspaper, later joining Managing Automation, a monthly B2B manufacturing magazine, as senior editor. During that time, Neil was also a correspondent for The Boston Globe, covering local news. She joined PMMI Media Group in 2015 as a senior editor for Automation World and continues to write for both AW and OEM, covering manufacturing news, technology trends, and workforce issues.

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