Manufacturing and Distribution

[Doug Heywood]

Manufacturing and Distribution

[Doug Heywood]

Toro shies away from head office SAP reports

Toro Australia is installing a new business intelligence system to escape a data access bottleneck between it and its U.S.-based head office.

The company as a whole – including head office and its subsidiaries – runs off a single instance of SAP ERP, which is housed in the United States.

To create reports, Toro Australia had to first request the information be extracted from the corporate SAP system into a data warehouse, from where the company could run up reports using SAP Business Data Warehouse v3.

“All that was happening on the U.S. side so naturally the response and query times were quite slow,” said Tim Hogan, business intelligence manager at Toro Australia.

“We were always operating within a fair bottleneck with the bandwidth available to us, and also because the reporting software was only specific to SAP data.”

Hogan told iTNews that Toro Australia is in the process of shifting off Business Data Warehouse to QlikView to handle local reporting.

“Because we operate as a fully-owned subsidiary, even though they lock us into things like SAP, we’re able to use other operational applications provided we have a business case for them,” said Hogan.

“We can do quite a bit that would be outside of the typical Toro United States culture.”

QlikView acts as an ETL tool that connects to multiple sources, both SAP and third-party, and as the presentation GUI for the information. It includes a series of GUI ‘building blocks’ that Toro has used to present its information.

Toro Australia has approximately 32 reports – what they call ‘analysis applications’ – that reside on a central server and then accessible via the company’s intranet.

The first application to be re-developed in QlikView is for sales analysis, Hogan said.

“We now produce the applications ad-hoc depending on what user requirements come up,” said Hogan.

“For example, someone might come to us wanting to consolidate information from a vendor against gross sales data. We’re able to consolidate the two data sources and turn it around in under an hour in some cases.”

QlikView was launched in Australia in 2003 and is distributed by Inside Info. The company’s managing director, Stuart Barnard, said the software now has over 200 customers locally.

Toro Australia is a fully-owned subsidiary of Toro Company, a supplier of irrigation products to the landscape, agricultural, turf care and domestic household garden markets. It has 250 employees locally.

[Doug Heywood]

SOA the logical choice for logistics giant, Dematic

Plug and play makes rip and replace, legacy systems history.

Darren Pauli 30/10/2008

A $1.5 billion global logistics company is not what many consider agile, but Dematic has proven it is just that after the Asia Pacific arm replaced its core IT architecture in less than a month with a platform built on Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

The United States-based company employs 500 staff in its Asia Pacific sites and is one of the largest suppliers of automated materials handling equipment. It deploys some of the most innovative technology in the industry — much of it developed in the company's research and development centres including its 30 seat Sydney office — used in its client warehouses such as Woolworths, Myers and P&O Ports, and for its own operations.

Its services include logistics, mechatronics and IT such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) connection, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and track and trace.

The company's IT shop of 10 was handed a 90-day deadline to shaft all business process and technology infrastructure, including its core SAP system, after then-Dematic owner Siemens sold the company to Germany-based Triton in late 2006.

Local CIO Allan Davies bucked the trend to deploy the SAP templates used by its European and US offices to rebuild with solutions built on SOA.

“Our expense management system, hosted with Siemens, required four days a month of manual data entry into our enterprise management system,” Davies said, noting the restructure required extensive training and the deployment of a new private branch exchange and a wide area network.

“SOA lets us basically plug and play. I know how painful legacy systems are and this means we don't need to mess around because we need to be very responsive.

“We have a lot of feeds from our systems that have to be managed and we tended to write a lot of interfaces — we have eliminated the legacy systems .”

Davies said the company saved $500,000 a year in licensing costs by swapping SAP for an Infor ERP system as well as its asset management and financials. Still more was saved by the abolition of legacy systems which Davis said chewed up a considerable amount of cash.

The numerous interfaces from data collecting nodes, including maintenance and monitoring systems, have been simplified in line with Dematic’s swing to SOA.

The expense management system has been pulled back in-house where it will be connected to a new client assessment management and process management platform. Davies will focus on automating invoice, purchase order approval process and business intelligence, and squeezing more out of existing systems.

“In the lean times ahead we need to squeeze more out of what we have,” he said.

Dematic's processes have been refined over the last four years, including the introduction of ITIL's change management in the service desk, which is about 60 percent complete.

Davies said IT shops should cherry pick the parts of ITIL which are suitable for the business, or risk “drowning for little benefit”.

Without the software like the enterprise asset management system, Woolworths would be without fruit and Myers stores would run out of perfume. It functions as the brain between a complex array of sensors and controllers that decide what technology, be it pick-to-light or RFID, will be used.

He said RFID, while initially expensive, is an important link in the logistics chain because it makes companies like Dematic versatile enough to ship different products as markets change.

“You need to be adaptable to move different products and it is a matter of picking the right technology, Davies said.”

Dematic deployed the Infor suite of enterprise software, including its ERP system, asset management and financials.

[admin]

PR from Rockwell ...

Wednesday 03 December 2008

Produce reports without being an IT expert

By Peta Eliot

ENTERPRISE Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) real-time visibility and performance management software is part of the fastest-growing segment of production management software.

By collecting real-time data at the plant floor, establishing operational context, and revealing manufacturing information to the rest of the enterprise, it enables a higher level of performance at the plant level and throughout the distributed manufacturing enterprise and supply network.
Recently acquired by Rockwell Automation, Incuity Software is a pioneer in this market space.

"The acquisition provides some immediate benefits for Rockwell and our customers from a technical point of view with the adoption of Incuity's Unified Production Model or UPM," Rockwell Automation senior consultant, information solutions centre, Alec Konynenburg told Manufacturers' Monthly.

"A further driver for Rockwell is the use of Incuity to 'glue' not only its own offerings but also competitor's offerings together into a cohesive system. Many software products have evolved over the years to solve a particular problem and maybe at varying levels of maturity and development. Incuity can provide a unifying model and presentation layer to extend the useful life of these systems," said Konynenburg.

Rockwell sees Incuity's technology as a "shift away" from requiring a highly skilled technical user to manage the information integration between various systems to a more easily understood business focused model.

The latest solution is the IncuityEMI version 2.6 software, designed to access the data from many disparate sources throughout a manufacturing facility, then organise, analyse and present that information via user-friendly web browsers or similar remote interfaces.

IncuityEMI software unifies normally incompatible information - such as the time-series data generated on the plant floor and the transaction-oriented data contained in enterprise business systems - and enables decisions to be made.
According to Konyenburg, the standard data model, known as the 'unified production model' (UPM), forms the heart and soul of the IncuityEMI solution. "It provides information to end-users in everyday language, in the context they require it," he said.

"You don't need a sea of IT consultants to generate reports. The data model organises the data from all the different sources and presents it with relevance to the data surrounding it. It's extremely powerful."
Demonstrating inherent flexibility, the UPM can utilise custom-designed or pre-defined data (such as ISA S95).

IncuityEMI brings context to narrow, focused information from sources such as plant-floor controllers, SCADA and historians, plus laboratory, batch and maintenance systems, as well as manufacturing execution systems (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

The UPM references this information without extracting or storing it, then combines and correlates the real-time data in the context of recreational and transactional business data, such as business goals, supply chain requirements and compliance parameters. The real-time data is presented simply in the form of web portals or dashboards, plus can be exported to Microsoft Excel.

"One of the key benefits of IncuityEMI is its ability to leverage existing infrastructure," Konynenburg said, "It bridges all existing systems so business don't need to change what they already have in place, plus it's easily expanded to accommodate additions. Moreover, it is a zero-footprint application: once loaded on a nominated server, any computer terminal with the right security authorisation can access the tool via a web interface."

Incuity software has been deployed in a wide range of manufacturing and process related industries. It is in use across all major industry verticals including discrete manufacturing activities such as automotive and component manufacture, according to Konynenburg.

"Manufacturing is about more than tags and equipment. Users don't think in terms of tag names and table names. They think about real world things like equipment and product and batches. To get the big picture you need an understanding of the materials, energy, equipment, personnel and information used to produce products.

"You also need to understand the cost, quality, quantity, safety and time constraints of production. And you need this understanding within the broader context of business goals, supply chain issues and compliance requirements.

"Your business intelligence solution must help to integrate and present information ranging from process variables and events through production schedules and batch records to key performance indicators and scorecards," he said.

Incuity implementations can range in scope from a "quick start" offering to get a customer up and running in a matter of days to a more consultative approach for a project that may last several months.

Some of the benefits being experienced by existing customers are easily measured such as a decrease in production cycle times as well as reducing and more accurately measuring manufacturing inputs including energy and materials. Other benefits are related to enhanced visibility and more informed decision making such as providing visibility of critical equipment to better monitor their health and performance to prevent costly replacements and associated downtimes.
For more information contact:
Rockwell Automation
P - 03 9896 0300
W - www.rockwellautomation.com.au

[admin]

From CIO Magazine:

Dairy Farmers’ huge operations rely on Mid-Comp and Vision Solutions for ‘backup within minutes’

09 December, 2008 09:58:00

Dairy Farmers is an Australian dairy processing and distribution co-operative. Over the past century, Dairy Farmers has grown into an enterprise with an annual turnover of $A1.3 billion and 1,800 employees.

With 68 locations around Australia, 12 of them manufacturing sites, and a supply chain of 72 hours from the farm to the supermarket shelf, Dairy Farmers truly is a 24 x 365 organisation.

To assist consolidation of reporting and common systems used, the implemented SAP's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system on IBM Power i5 System hardware. With no backup window, no allowance for system downtime and huge transactional volumes, Dairy Farmers needed a robust high availability solution that would ensure continuous business operations.

“As a 24 X 365 business, it is absolutely imperative that Dairy Farmers’ information systems remain operational at all times. Of the solutions available on the Australian market, only Vision Solutions was able to demonstrate compliance with these key criteria satisfactorily.” said Tony Talbot, Group Information Services Manager. “The data volumes resulting from a SAP implementation also meant that a tape backup solution had to be found that allowed the business to continue.”

In its search for a high availability solution, a primary requirement was that it integrated with the current IBM i5 environment. Talbot said other key selection criteria included SAP certification and local support.

“The company’s demonstrated commitment to a successful implementation, both directly and through its Vision Industry Partner (VIP) program, swung the balance in Vision Solutions’ favour.”

The company chose Vision Solutions’ Vision Suite™ to mirror the SAP application data to a backup server. Upon the completion of the SAP implementation, approximately 1,100 named users were accessing the system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from all sites.

Dairy Farmers uses SAP as its application software while the production and backup server hardware is based on IBM i5 servers. The production server is a Model 570 9/16-way, the backup server a Model 890 16/24-way. Both systems are Logically Partitioned (LPAR). The Model 570 hosts the production SAP R/3, Business Warehouse and Supply Chain Planning systems. The Model 890 hosts the target systems for the Vision Suite as well as development and quality assurance SAP systems.

The SAP applications are used to control everything from milk intake to the factory, through the production process to a distribution front-end system. It also covers sales & operations planning, financial systems, asset management, sales reporting and business intelligence.

Technical support for Dairy Farmers is provided through Mid-Comp, Vision Solutions’ Australian-based VIP, and occasionally through direct contact with the Vision Solutions CustomerCare team.

“We are impressed with the professionalism and responsiveness of Mid-Comp and the CustomerCare Response Centre,” said Talbot.

For Dairy Farmers, Vision Suite’s most important benefit is the ability to role swap to the recovery system at any time, with minimal impact to the users. “Whether this is for planned maintenance or unplanned system failures, continuous operations are important for us,” he said.
Vision Suite's role swap capability has allowed Dairy Farmers to provide system availability, all day, every day.

“Although the IBM Power Systems are very reliable, should the production system fail, the backup can be available within minutes. Additional benefits are the ability to perform tape backups of production data and performance of system maintenance without any user downtime.”

Since implementing Vision Suite, Dairy Farmers has had to switch users to the recovery server three times for extended periods due to hardware and/or software errors. Without Vision Suite, this could have represented significant loss to their bottom line. With an annual turnover of $A1.3 billion, Dairy Farmers can ill afford even one day's downtime.


For more information: Denis Vaughan, Mid-Comp International Phone: +61. (0)3 9915 5200

[Doug Heywood]

Wednesday 17 December 2008 Manufacturers' Monthly
Linking operations and management

By Christopher Crowe*

WATER and wastewater plants share similar challenges with all industries: the supply of a quality product (safe, treated water of required quantity); minimising operating and capital costs; and meeting regulatory requirements.

However, a water and wastewater authority does have one unique challenge: the collection, treatment and distribution system for a metropolitan water and wastewater organisation typically covers hundreds or thousands of square metres.

So how can this industry effectively monitor such a geographically dispersed system and identify ways to reduce operating costs? The answer lies in integrating an automation and control system with a business intelligence system to provide the organisation with volumes of meaningful real-time data about plant operations, which will then allow management to identify ways to improve processes and cut costs.

An automation and control system such as CitectSCADA can monitor water levels of distant reservoirs and lakes, control chemical additions and flow rates in multiple tanks and lagoons, monitor pumps operated at lift stations and produce regulatory reports for local and national authorities.
However, for this data to become useful, it must be recovered and presented to operations management in a higher-level form. This can be achieved by integrating the automation and control system with a Manufacturing Execution System (MES).

The benefit of using an MES for water and wastewater treatment applications is to link operations and management systems, which provides real-time management metrics and visibility into the supply and treatment processes.
An MES enables organisations to control factors which drive their business by aligning and measuring KPIs against business strategies. The resulting real-time automation information removes guesswork and uncertainty, enabling key personnel to deliver fast and incremental returns to their business.

MES systems are designed to gather data from all areas within an enterprise (SCADA, EAM, CMMS or LIMS), from the business level, as well as the operations level. The data is presented in understandable formats via a suite of modules to suit an organisation's specific business needs.

From reservoirs to the kitchen sink, integrated SCADA and MES software can help organisations meet their challenges.

*Christopher Crowe is CEO, Citect, www.citect.com.

[Doug Heywood]

Wednesday 17 December 2008 Logistics
Superset release

By Anna Game-Lopata

Epicor is re-defining enterprise performance. So says the company’s James Norwood, Global VP Product Marketing.

“Epicor believes that midsized (in particular) businesses have been underserved by the traditional BI software vendors,” he says.

“Performing at the highest level requires the entire enterprise, not just a chosen few.”

Norwood says the company’s latest application Epicor 9 distances itself from the ‘traditional' concept of business intelligence by taking it out of the hands of analysts and technicians and transferring it to all the enterprises users for greater business insight."

“Today, decisions are being made top down and bottom up on a daily basis that affect the overall performance of the business,” he explains. “Current information needs to support decision making in real-time, and workers want it deployed in the tools they already use, day in and day out."

"Therefore an embedded capability of Epicor 9 is Epicor Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) , which removes the barriers to better business insight through a combination of intuitive user experiences, user driven key performance indicators (KPI), and pre-packaged analytics that have real meaning to the business.”

Epicor 9 combines Web 2.0 concepts with Epicor True SOA, an adaptable and collaborative business architecture that satisfies the needs of any enterprise regardless of country, industry or access device.

The solution's end-to-end features provide a dynamic user experience and real-time, in-context business insight.
“Epicor 9 is just the next step in Epicor's 'protect, extend, and converge' strategy, enabling customers to leverage the latest technology at their own pace.”

Like many, Norwood observes the supply chain industry is all about delivering products and services to market faster, cheaper and with better quality, and gaining a compelling advantage over less efficient competitors.

“To do that, you have to make sure that the right materials and resources move to the right place at the right time, at the same time serving customers better, while minimising costs and maximising profit,” he says.

“Many Epicor customers are hybrid manufacturer/distributors and they appreciate the ability to apply lean processes to their entire supply-chain, optimise planning and maximise allocation/pick/pack/ship decisions in order to ensure perfect order fulfilment.”

Norwood also says visibility is paramount. “While the larger vendors try to pare down their more complex systems to meet the basic needs of the midmarket, our service-oriented approach has allowed us to deliver a robust ERP solution encompassing all the functionality and flexibility of a tier one solution that our customers need,” he says, “with a core financial system that supports a lean supply chain, enhanced supply chain visibility and supports globalisation aspirations.
All these components work together to give users a competitive edge.” Norwood points to the company’s proven success in developing and delivering service-oriented enterprise applications used by thousands of companies around the world today, as proof that integration issues are a thing of the past.

“Epicor has converged the best of its offerings into Epicor 9, a next-generation superset release,” he adds.
“Encompassing the robust functionality, global footprint and industry expertise of Epicor's existing ERP suites, the release takes business management and control to the next level by extending reach, synergy, and visibility to the organization and its trading partners.”

“Perhaps the most important aspect of Epicor next-generation SCM is that it is modular yet embedded with the rest of the application (CRM, Finance, Inventory, etc)."
"This removes the integration challenges of the past and provides a single, reliable resource for mission critical supply-chain management."

"Interfaces to EDI demand and to manifesting systems have been standardised around a single XML API and orchestrated via Epicor Service Connect for complete process and workflow control."

Epicor Service Connect is a central integration point for secure workflow orchestrations within Epicor applications and between Epicor and non-Epicor applications.

“Users can automate tasks and streamline processes to promote efficiency across the supply and demand chains,” Norwood explains.

“They can extend visibility into enterprise applications to the entire organisation and to customers. Epicor Service Connect integrates with EDI supply chain partners using XML, a lower cost alternative to maintaining a full EDI infrastructure.”

“Additionally, what makes Epicor 9 different is the way that all client code, as well as application business logic, is delivered as self-describing business services, offering a tremendous step forward in the creation of productive user experiences,” he says.

James Norwood predicts ERP systems of the future will evolve into looser collection of business services that become completely available in whatever means makes sense - through a browser, on a PC or laptop, on a mobile device or as part of another composite application.

“As a tightly integrated supply chain has become a requirement for doing business in almost every industry today, Web services technology is the key to successfully orchestrating global operations,” he says.

“The ability to perform real-time collaboration with suppliers, partners and customers, and throughout business operations, enables an organisation to optimise production and delivery schedules and quickly respond to changes in customer requirements and market demands.”

[fgeorge]

Mobile intelligence ready for take off in 2009

12 January 2009

THE enterprise planning process - planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting - is a formidable challenge for any business and nowhere is this more true than in the complex world of manufacturing.


Yes, despite its importance to a company's financial wellbeing, planning is often put on the back-burner because it is seen as burdensome and time-consuming.


And therein lies the opportunity for the forward-thinking organisation as we enter 2009.


Leading manufacturers will seize the opportunity by leveraging new technologies and employing best practices in planning, budgeting and forecasting. They will be rewarded with more accurate plans, timely forecasts, and effective decision-making.


Overall, and improve collaboration enterprise-wide, and foster a disciplined financial management culture that drives true competitive advantage.


One increasingly prevalent technology which will see heightened adoption in the manufacturing sector will be the mobilisation of applications which will transform businesses and strengthen the link between strategic objectives and operational and financial plans, while fostering communications and collaboration among managers.


Given the increase in the number of remote workers and the growing trend for individuals to work on- the-go, there is a resulting need to be connected and interact with business-critical information wherever they are.


Mobile phones and PDAs now provide alternative, powerful means to process business information versus a PC or laptop.


The sheer variety of Web-based applications in existence and the fact that you can now go to a Web browser on a mobile device to use a familiar Web interface to work with personal and business information are all part of this changing landscape of mobile accessibility - a landscape which impacts both your customers and the manufacturing plant itself.


With today's technology advances, the mobile device is now a place where you can consume the relevant information about your business, such as the business intelligence dashboards, scorecards, analysis and reports that you traditionally have only been able to see while at the office.


The added convenience of seeing the same charts and information on the mobile device as users enjoy on their regular desktop is here and now and will become commonplace in the year ahead.


This mobile "business intelligence" is also a step towards "location intelligence", which can contribute the additional element of "where you are" to the application, giving mobile access a new type of business value.

*David Merchant is marketing manager at ANZ Cognos.

[Steve Bennett]

3 January 2009 04:06PM

IT News

Australian Pharmaceutical Industries’ wholesale division has installed a Microstrategy business intelligence system that will draw on information from the firm’s Teradata-based data warehouse.

The company, which claims to be one of Australia’s largest pharmacy wholesale distribution and health and beauty retailers, said its pharmacy wholesale division plans to use MicroStrategy ‘for its analysis and reporting of key business performance indicators’.

“Our strategic requirements focus on enabling self-service for business users to quickly get the data they need, coupled with easier administration and maintenance for IT,“ said Michael Vodicka, CIO at API.

No details were provided on what tool Microstrategy will replace.

[Steve Bennett]

3 January 2009 04:06PM

IT News

Australian Pharmaceutical Industries’ wholesale division has installed a Microstrategy business intelligence system that will draw on information from the firm’s Teradata-based data warehouse.

The company, which claims to be one of Australia’s largest pharmacy wholesale distribution and health and beauty retailers, said its pharmacy wholesale division plans to use MicroStrategy ‘for its analysis and reporting of key business performance indicators’.

“Our strategic requirements focus on enabling self-service for business users to quickly get the data they need, coupled with easier administration and maintenance for IT,“ said Michael Vodicka, CIO at API.

No details were provided on what tool Microstrategy will replace.