Remote analytics service set to help businesses reconnect plant KPIs
1 min read
Business managers at mid-size manufacturers can now get a better handle on plant and factory performance – and do so at very low cost.
SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software and MES (manufacturing execution system) developer Citect says it intends to launch a hosted application service dubbed Meta next month, priced at around £100 per exec user per month.
Not only will that provide for remote monitoring and analysis of a wide range of KPIs across various functions and multiple sites; it will also compare those against industry averages via a link with analyst ARC.
Frank Volcker, global director for Meta at Citect, says it’s all about enabling corporate management to benchmark their plants in terms of overall safety, quality, OEE (operational equipment effectiveness) and the rest – and also to assess and prioritise improvement programmes.
“Corporate managers and plant mangers can compare KPIs and then conclude where they should be investing and standardising,” says Volcker. “We’ve seen variances of 100% to 150% using the tool that would otherwise be lost in Excel spreadsheets.”
Citect has been working on the system for about a year, and has a patent pending. Volcker makes the point that it’s not about gathering and analysing detailed downtime data – there are already systems for that. This is aimed at corporate users wanting weekly and monthly KPI data to justify capital investment programmes and to indicate areas most ripe for improvement.
“There’s a huge opportunity to improve performance through better targeted continuous improvement,” he says. “This will create a brand new value proposition. In Australia we’re offering a 30-day trial and just letting corporate users loose with their data… One customer now wants a 42 inch screen with a dashboard and a webcam to connect corporate to the manufacturing side of the business.”
The relationship with ARC will take this further, with industry-specific KPI benchmarks for aspects like safety, quality, productivity and due-date performance. Over the next year, Citect and ARC say they will provide comparison data for manufacturers primarily in the discrete engineering sector, food and beverage and similar markets.
“Safety seems to be the prevalent requirement, with quality resolving down to one KPI – customer complaints per million produced. But we’ll also cover production performance – OTIF, OEE and other KPI categories like maintenance, physical stops and so on.”
