This article first appeared in IMPO's August 2013 issue.
Northwest Analytics, provider of manufacturing intelligence solutions for process industries, announces the launch of NWA Focus EMI®, a next-generation enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) solution that provides complete data source integration, and real-time process analytics and visibility. The solution’s two unique accelerating modules, KnowledgeBase and Collaboration, greatly improve a user’s ability to accumulate and disseminate knowledge across the entire enterprise. This allows collaboration across geographically dispersed manufacturing operations to pinpoint and quickly resolve issues and share best practices.
The first market-driven EMI solution, NWA Focus EMI supports all commercial databases for chemical manufacturing. It delivers a unique approach to data integration by directly accessing data where it ‘lives,’ combining data from multiple sources and applying analytics in real-time to support and drive smart operational decisions. The system-wide KnowledgeBase module consolidates process, quality, and problem-solving knowledge in a single, discoverable database supporting shared knowledge and best practices across plant and global operations. The cloud-based Collaboration module quickly mobilizes expertise and experience across the enterprise to solve critical production issues. Asynchronous communication integrates graphics, pictures, text, documents, and video to seamlessly share important, complex information. This ensures the right people have the right information and context to solve the most pressing manufacturing issues quickly, thus saving time, money, and resources.
“NWA Focus EMI delivers complete data integration with a ubiquitous analytics layer to deliver real-time process visibility across a single line or plant, or across the entire enterprise, putting the power in the hands of the customer to effectively drive meaningful value from data to reduce costs, increase yields, and improve product quality. The KnowledgeBase and Collaboration Modules accelerate the value of EMI by capturing and proliferating best practices, and quickly bringing together experts from around the enterprise to resolve pressing operational issues through collaboration,” said Peter Guilfoyle, VP of Marketing for Northwest Analytics.
According to Northwest Analytics CTO Louis Halvorsen, “Current vendors of manufacturing and process-oriented software fall short of what really delivers the value and results in immediate process improvement, cost reduction, and faster problem resolution. That gap is the accumulation of knowledge acquired from EMI across an organization and the ability to leverage that knowledge through immediate communications and enterprise-wide collaboration. That’s the gap NWA Focus EMI so uniquely fills.”
The Dow Chemical Company became an early adopter for NWA Focus EMI and has 14 plants using the solution. “We were looking for a better way to retrieve, join, and analyze data and turn that information into real knowledge throughout the organization,” says Lloyd Colegrove, Director of Fundamental Problem Solving at The Dow Chemical Company. “NWA EMI Focus, with its ability to directly access data from multiple databases and apply analytics in real time, is giving us immediate access to critical process information and focuses us on the information and best practices that most influence and improve our production output and quality.”
Guilfoyle adds that implementation of the EMI solution averages only 1-3 weeks and output is often returned in just a few hours after the start of the implementation. “Based on customer feedback, NWA Focus EMI delivers a full system payback in two to six months. That is a direct result of the solution leveraging existing database investments and eliminating data duplication and its movement to a separate system for analysis. Measurable soft returns include fast solution implementations, quick user adoption, and more meaningful information, which increases operational performance and impacts a company’s profitability and bottom line,” he says.
NWA Focus EMI is available by contacting Northwest Analytics directly at [email protected].