The Future of Manufacturing: Prescriptive Analytics and Operational Intelligence

Check out my colleague Dick Slansky's latest blog on how he blogged last week about the need for more intelligence in edge devices and smart sensors. Additionally, I commented in an earlier blog include how completed operational and executed work records, quality assurance records, work flow histories, operational deviations and variations, engineering changes, and many other records related to the production process represented the real big data for manufacturing. The point being that this big data for manufacturing was the real treasure trove of information that would allow advanced analytics applications to actually optimize and determine best practices for the production processes. In other words, if you want to actually implement continuous process improvement one has to examine the complete production process record history to discover both the flaws (risks) and the best methods in the design/build lifecycle.

In order to follow up on this concept, I would like to take a bit of a deeper (but not too deep) dive into the topic of performance analytics, operational intelligence, or closed-loop PLM, all apt descriptions of this notion of process improvement and validating as-built to as-designed. This is where I see the real payback of advanced analytics, that is, going beyond predictive to prescriptive analytics, where we bring together big data, statistical sciences, rules-based logic, and machine learning to empirically discover and reveal the origins of the complex problems, and then determine decision-based options to resolve them.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing, both discrete and process, have the most stored data (well over 1500 petabytes) of any industrial or business sector. One could make the case that this represents a digital brain trust or the primary source of basically unstructured data that needs to aggregated, analyzed, and converted into actionable information. Moreover, when this information is placed in the context of a design/build lifecycle, it becomes a closed-loop mechanism that is connected by a digital thread that includes product development, manufacturing, and services in the field. In essence, the data that is held in a repository which is the result of manufacturing execution operations records becomes a source for operational intelligence, product performance and production process improvement......To learn more check out http://bit.ly/2aiJW5z