The Data Heads

Update July 7, 2010: KPI Dashboard screen cap added below.

The Mug Hug Mug

I’m finally getting around to reporting on the Monday’s joint Minitab / Hertzler User Group meeting. Jay Bronec of QualiFine took my cheesy idea for a name seriously and gave everyone MUG HUG mugs. They’re pretty cool.

We had great presentations from a bunch of people, but the show stealer was Jamie Dobravec’s. Maybe it is because he was talking about something near and dear to my heart – KPI Dashboards. But I don’t think it was just me.

Jamie has been using GainSeeker for years, beginning back in the DOS days. As a manufacturing engineering he became accustomed to relying on GainSeeker for up-to-the minute shop floor quality data.

All these years later he is now Operations Manager and he found himself longing for timely business metrics – things like month-to-date sales performance, gross profit margin, on time deliveries and first pass yield.

His ERP system had all this information, but he couldn’t get to it.

Well, thats not quite true. He could get to it, but it meant manually running nine different queries on his AS400, and then cutting and pasting data into Excel so he could turn it into a graph. The manual system was so time consuming that he just couldn’t do it and do his real job. And like everyone else, he is operating lean – so there is nobody he can throw the work at and say “I need this report every day at 7am.” So in reality, he couldn’t get to it.

He also considered traditional BI and ERP reporting solutions, and found they had lots of zeros in the price tag. Given the cash crunch of the recession, he couldn’t justify the expense.

Enter Jay Bronec of QualiFine.

Jay’s a smart and savvy guy, and he knows about as much as anybody on our technical staff. And Jamie was already using GainSeeker in his business operations, so he didn’t need to spend any capital. He didn’t need any extra software licenses.

Jamie sat down and sketched out what he wanted. He said it wasn’t on a napkin, but as close as you can get without lunch. And Jay went to work.

Now with a couple of clicks, Jamie gets an up-to-the-minute dashboard of his critical business performance metrics (KPIs). He can drill into the raw data and see trend charts or Pareto charts behind the dashboards. Its all there.

Grayhill KPI Dashboard

I wrote up a short account of the case study and published it on our website. Jay has one with more quotes from Jamie, and a little more detail on his web site.

What about you? Would a dashboard of your organization’s Key Performance Indicators help you make better, more timely business decisions? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

One thing I like about blogging is that you can call something by its real name. Last month my business partner and our Alpha Geek, Byron Shetler, attended the OPC Foundation’s Interoperability Conference 2010. When we refer to it in our press release, that’s what we call it.

But in this blog I can call it what it really was: a Geek Fest.

What is a Geek Fest, you ask? Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words:

If you look carefully, you’ll see Byron all the way down on the right side of the table. He is the guy leaning forward in a white polo shirt.

Click on the picture to open it in another window. Then click on it again to blow it up to full size.

What I love about this picture is the story that the tangle of network cables and power strips and half-empty coffee cups tells. Two tables. Maybe 45 people. Ear buds jammed in ears cranking out tunes. (Bonus point if you can name who that is. Double bonus if you can guess the tune.) Hands on foreheads in deep thought. All crammed in a conference room with enough computing power to launch a rocket.

And just in case you were wondering – it is all guys.

So why did we go to this particular Geek Fest, and what did we accomplish?

OPC is an open connectivity standard that defines how shop floor equipment and manufacturing software communicate with each other. Think of how printer drivers make it possible for all the software on your computer to communicate with your printer. OPC does the same thing for shop floor controls and equipment.

We developed the OPC interface to GainSeeker Suite a few years ago, and wrote up a nice case study about how the GainSeeker OPC interface was so easy to deploy and saved a customer a lot of money.

At the time, we tested the interface with two of the most important vendors of OPC drivers (Kepware and Matrikon). We used them because they provide stand-alone demo systems. We needed the demo system because we can’t implement a full-fledged factory information system. After all, we don’t have a factory. And as our customers have implemented the solution we’ve verified that it works with GE Fanuc, Rockwell Automation, and several others.

Recently, the OPC Foundation has been pushing hard for vendors to test their systems at an interoperability workshop. The workshop runs for a full week. It isn’t a trivial commitment.

(As a side note, I have to mention that before the Foundation started pushing interoperability testing, several of our direct competitors were members of the OPC Foundation. Last time I checked, they had all dropped off the list. Now if you search for “SPC” on the Foundation website, we’re the only fully-featured SPC system vendor listed. Everyone else has an all-encompassing factory management system that happens to include a control chart somewhere in their product.)

These workshops bring vendors together from all around the world so that you can really test the interoperability of your system in all kinds of conditions. At the workshop, Byron was able to test the interface with software from these vendors:

• Yokogawa Electric Corp.
• Takebishi Corp.
• Software Toolbox
• Siemens AG
• OSISoft, Inc.
• MSIndustrie Software GmbH
• MatrikonOPC
• Kepware Technologies
• InduSoft LLC
• GE Intelligent Platforms
• Emerson Process Management

We weren’t surprised that the testing went smoothly. But it was great to conduct so many tests at one time. Byron says he built a database of OPC servers and tags, and then wrote a template in GainSeeker Suite that let him select a server and put it through its paces. Once he had the infrastructure set up, he could conduct a new test in a matter of minutes.

And as Byron put it: “Our testing addressed all of the functionality that we need to support our customers. It was cool to get all these companies in one room, bang on each other’s software, and prove that everything works as advertised.”

Did you get that? “It was cool to bang on each other’s software.”

That’s what I call a Geek Fest!

If you’re not looking for a Geek Fest, but you are looking for an easy way to get to process data, OPC may be the way to go. Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.