Analytics header

Friday, August 20, 2010

EMI or BI - what are those anyways?

Lately I have had inquiries from a couple of customers about providing “intelligence”, as in manufacturing intelligence, well I believe that is a good topic I said… (Hint, see my blog’s title).

In most cases their curiosity came from either seeing or working with an EMI or Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence system. However when I asked about how they would like to use the intelligence I found out that they where asking about BI – Business Intelligence behavior, yet they wanted manufacturing metrics like the EMI system’s demo. That is an interesting discussion that I have mentioned a few times in this blog. I believe that what they really want are timely and sometimes real-time intelligence about their manufacturing operations provided in KPI lists, metrics and charts but also analytics capabilities such as “slicing and dicing” and “drill downs”.

Unfortunately I have found that such solutions are rare if they exist at all. It seems that EMI is a separate animal than BI and the problems that they are trying to address are more complicated than they generally convey in their sales and marketing information. Most EMIs do not provide an effective way to aggregate and correlate information to support BI style analytics, while the BI vendors’ understanding of 'real-time' and timeliness leave much to be desired for application in the manufacturing operations world.

Monday, August 16, 2010

I am back, sorry for the delay...


It has been a while since I posted something here, and I have a long list of bad excuses. (Here is the last one).

It has been a very exciting and busy time for me and my family. We have relocated from Indiana to the San Francisco Bay Area with all the excitement and hard work that follows. I guess that we are getting settled now so I am going to try and pick-up the blogging just a bit. I have quite a few interesting things to share so I hope find some time over the next month to do some more blogging.

I have been involved in some very interesting projects. I am working with BioMarin helping them figure out what MES will work best for them and some of the strategies around implementation. I have also had a short stint with Amgen looking at their Manufacturing Business Intelligence initiative. Apart from that I have been involved with a few of the Bay Area Biotech companies while at the same time trying to find new customers in North America.

On the event front I am planning to be at CBI's annual MES event (San Diego, in Sep.), AdvaMed (Washington DC, in Oct.), and the ISPE annual meeting (Orlando, Nov.) where we are organizing an educational session on Operational Excellence. So if you are going to be at any of these events let me know so we can catch-up. It’s going to be an interesting and busy period.