Operation Intelligence(Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) vs Business Intelligence (BI) the Difference and it are the time it be recognized!

So many times when I visit a customer site or discuss with product develops, or engineering houses people get confused over what are the roles of each system, and they must work in conjunction but they not the same. Especially when companies already have a business Intelligence strategy and tools, but they also have process analysis tools (trending) but let's move the focus away from engineers to the consumers of the information and their transforming role in achieving operational excellence.

The question of “why a company should implement an EMI solution if they already spent money on a BI solution. They already have the “slice and dice” and analytical ability within BI, so why waste money on an EMI solution?”

The realization is that users in the real time operations require empowerment capability to make decisions, to be able to access “trust worthy information” quickly and easily. Quickly seeing status of plant, operations, and easily been able to apply limited operational analysis to answer well known “Operational situational questions”. EMI and BI have different purposes, and they are aimed at a different audience. Manufacturing-specific reporting and intelligence are different in content, context and data frequency than the data in BI.

I had a long discussion with Gerhard Greeff (Divisional Manager: Bytes PMC, MESA trainer), on this subject, and he totally agreed in the miss understanding, that people have and how often they tried to use BI tools to build operational dashboards for operations and they do not get accepted or used. Also, this exercise results in significant IT projects to build the tools, and gather the data, so often to be far less effective that MS Excel, which many operational people will configure what they want. The requirement now is for consistency of information, and measures, causing a transformation in the market caused by “Apple” that time to access and value is far more critical than “perfection on information layout” introducing the concept of “good enough” will do. Like we do on many applications on smart phones where down loaded applications based upon a functional need, and have limited ability to change it, except the basic configuration, but it works and is delivering value fast.

You may be asking can you clarify the difference, so I have used some text from Gerhard’s paper in “The Mom Chronicles”.

“Data in a BI solution is typically at the same low frequency as that of the ERP system such as daily values. For a Plant manager that wants to know what is happening on a shift or hourly basis, BI will thus be inadequate. BI tools are typically not designed and implemented to take into account the real-time nature of manufacturing operations and its very large data rate. As such, BI are not able to handle the high frequency of data receipt and the required fast response-times of reporting/visualisation required by manufacturing operations.

Executives use BI as strategic analysis and decision-making tools for the company. From their BI systems, they can see the profitability of individual plants and sites and, as such, can make the decision to close down a plant or to change the manufacturing strategy. They typically work on confirmed and validated numbers and results as they want to ensure they have accurate data when they make the decision. These validation/confirmation or auditing steps often add considerable time between the actual event and the time the data end up in the BI solution.

Site-level production personnel however cannot wait for the niceties of auditing and validation before they take action. If a report or an EMI dashboard indicates that something is wrong, it is their responsibility to investigate and take corrective action. If a feed-rate is lower than planned, the production manager is not going to wait for the confirmed result in the BI system tomorrow before he takes corrective steps. No, he is going to investigate or have someone investigate for him. If it turns out to be a false alarm, then he is glad as it is a crises averted. If something is wrong, he takes corrective action, or at least knows and expects the bad results from the BI system tomorrow. Production executives hate surprises, even good ones.

EMI systems thus have a two-fold purpose:

1. To provide early warning in real-time for potential problems in order to make decisions or take action, and

2. To provide “slice and dice” data on historical data and Operational data for process improvement, and operational status, delivering the information in time, equipment, and operational context.

EMI has data available at the granularity and frequency delivered by the individual applications. This can be from seconds to days, depending on the specific operations requirement. The data is also available per individual piece of equipment, line or processing unit and can also be rolled up into hours, shifts, days or weeks for any of these. The granularity of EMI systems is closer to real-time, and they are often used as real-time dashboards for Operations Executives.

BI may be able to provide the historical “slice and dice” data, but typically, not at the level of granularity required by operations managers. BI will not be able to provide the real-time early warning required by the plant. Both of these are thus needed to support manufacturing companies adequately.”

The challenges vendors have is how to deliver this operational information in a rapidly consumable form, with minor time and effort outside of operations. The system will need to evolve, with more operational questions answered out of the box, or an experience which enables operational people to answer these questions.