In Part 2 of this series of articles, we saw the difference between MES and EMI and why the control of MES and the global information delivery of EMI are both required for actionable intelligence. Now we do the same for EMI and business intelligence (BI) and we will also see how all this knowledge can best be applied throughout the enterprise by using the methodology of dynamic performance management (DPM).
What exactly is meant by business intelligence?
According to a Wikipedia definition, BI refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, on-line analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics.
Although BI uses technologies, processes and applications to analyse mostly internal, structured data about operational and business processes, it does not stop there. BI is also concerned with external factors such as competitive intelligence, supplier performance, market analyses and customer profiles.
Comparing EMI with BI
In order to better understand the differences between EMI and BI, it is useful to compare how they address key aspects of the business:
Objectives – The objective of EMI is to bring a company’s manufacturing related data together from many (and often disparate) sources and possibly across many plants for the purposes of creating context, generating reports, doing analyses, providing visual summaries and passing data between enterprise-level and plant-floor systems. On the other hand, the objective of BI is to provide the tactical decision support when viewing the entire company as a player in the broader context of the marketplace and its own production performance.
Target audience – For EMI, the target audience stretches from operations personnel to all levels of production and business management and on to executives. This is indeed a wide audience but really no surprise because production is at the core of any mining or manufacturing company. BI though, is more the domain of CEOs and CFOs and top executives who can guide the company towards achieving its goals from a business perspective.
Dynamic performance management
We have talked about EMI and BI at some length, what we have not explored yet is how all this intelligence might best be applied. While it is traditional to associate information intelligence with management, it is not necessarily where it will do the most good because of the different time frames between operational and business processes. The higher up one goes in an organisation the more things slow down on the decision front. The millisecond decisions of the shop floor are replaced by the more ponderous and weighty daily, weekly or monthly decisions of the top floor.
But, whatever the rate of information delivery, decisions still have to be made. At the automation end of the scale many decisions can be made by software, everywhere else decisions have to be made by people – especially when things go wrong.
DPM is about empowering and informing individuals in the company to make the right decisions at the right time to the benefit of the company’s bottom line and their job satisfaction. And it works extremely well because people hate to see things go wrong and delight to see where they made a positive contribution.
To find out more about the various tiers of information in an organisation, the technologies associated with each and the migration from OLTP to OLAP: read the full third article in this series at http://instrumentation.co.za/+C13950A
For more information contact Ugan Maistry, EOH Mining and Manufacturing, +27 (0)11 607 8142, ugan.maistry@eoh.co.za, www.eoh.co.za
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