Enterprise manufacturing intelligence

Enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI), or simply manufacturing intelligence (MI), is software used to bring a corporation's manufacturing-related data together from many sources for the purposes of reporting, analysis, visual summaries, and passing data between enterprise-level and plant-floor systems. As data is combined from multiple sources, it can be given a new structure or context that will help users find what they need regardless of where it came from. The primary goal is to turn large amounts of manufacturing data into real knowledge and drive business results based on that knowledge.

EMI was pioneered by Lighthammer Software Development in 2000, when Rick Bullotta and Russ Fadel saw the opportunity to deliver unified visibility across a diverse set of data sources, systems, and applications. The Lighthammer platform was the first industrial software to leverage web standards (HTML, Javascript, XML, REST APIs) to deliver local and remote access to EMI content to both people and to other systems. Lighthammer was acquired by SAP in 2005, and the resulting product SAP MII (Manufacturing Intelligence and Integration) is still in extensive use today.

Core functions

AMR Research has identified five core functions every Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence application should possess:

• Aggregation: Making available data from many sources, most often databases.
• Contextualization: Providing a structure, or model, for the data that will help users find what they need. Usually a folder tree utilizing a hierarchy such as the ISA-95 standard.
• Analysis: Enabling users to analyze data across sources and especially across production sites. This often includes the ability for true ad hoc reporting.
• Visualization: Providing tools to create visual summaries of the data to alert decision makers and call attention to the most important information of the moment. The most common visualization tool is the dashboard.
• Propagation: Automating the transfer of data from the plant-floor up to enterprise-level systems or vice versa.