Operational BI Solutions

Insights Library
- Overcoming the ERP Blues with Actionable IntelligenceWebinar - Can you readily identify your most profitable customers, products and channels? Would you know if you had issues with employee turnover and retention? Are you able to leverage enterprise-wide volume spending with your suppliers for greater discounts? If you've implemented an ERP system without incorporating business intelligence, the answer to these questions may well be "no." We'll show you how you can give executives and line-of-business users ongoing visibility into critical data locked within your ERP system and beat the "ERP blues."
- Targeting High-Value Needs using a BI RoadmapWebinar - Successfully orchestrating an enterprise-wide BI initiative is a significant undertaking, particularly when your effort encompasses multiple departments, locations and possibly even countries. How do you decide where to begin such a massive effort and which projects to tackle first? How can you accurately forecast and budget for what may be a multi-year project? How do you manage it all while running your business? During this Web briefing, we'll explore how building a roadmap that incorporates business-level impact analysis can be a critical step to achieving early strategic wins, avoiding pitfalls and ensuring continued BI success. You'll learn best practices for building a successful plan that mitigates risk, lowers costs and secures buy-in across the enterprise.
- Kick-Starting Your BI Efforts with a Quick WinWebinar - In the midst of this economy, you may wonder how you'll ever have the budget to pursue enterprise-wide BI. Or perhaps you've initiated a BI effort in the past only to have your project stall before completion. Harnessing business intelligence quickly and cost-effectively isn't an impossible dream, but it does require proven tools and sound methodologies. This Web briefing will explore critical success factors and technology approaches you can use to achieve quick, cost-effective wins for the business while laying the foundation for future enterprise-wide efforts.
- Critical Operational Intelligence WILL Improve Production Reliability - A Case Study in SavingsWebinar - This Web briefing will explore a dramatic case study demonstrating how BI was used to improve production reliability and minimize revenue disruption within a process manufacturing environment. Not only has critical operational intelligence saved the manufacturer millions in costs the first year alone, it has also eliminated unplanned shutdowns. We'll discuss the critical data sources that were united to achieve these benefits, best practices for implementation, how the manufacturer is using its BI system in daily practice and how your organization can achieve similar bottom-line results.

Executive View

Top Level Objectives

Industrial firms face increasing pressures in today’s economy as costs spiral upward and profit margins dwindle. Not only must firms strive to eliminate downtime and outages within their facilities to remain profitable, but they must also address critical environmental and safety concerns.

To address these needs, industrial firms need to leverage the massive volumes of reliability and operational data isolated in disparate sources throughout their plants. By verifying key performance indicators, integrating critical data sources and providing at-a-glance reporting, Rolta’s Operational Business Intelligence (BI) solutions can help firms increase their revenue potential, avoid unnecessary costs, improve decision-making and even save lives.

Solution - Innovation

Our operational BI Solutions integrate multiple, disparate data sources to provide critical insight into key performance indicators (KPIs). We employ a unique adaptor approach that allows us to quickly and effectively integrate data sources into a comprehensive data model. We are able to access critical historian and/or industrial control data sources in real-time using web services and SOA interfaces. By presenting this data in an intuitive dashboard format, we provide executives at-a-glance insight into plant-wide and/or enterprise-wide performance. Drill-to-detail functionality enables plant managers to perform meaningful analysis, and plant engineers are able to conduct root-cause analysis across multiple systems. To provide even greater visual insight, we design spatial BI solutions leveraging geospatial (GIS) data. Key data is presented in maps and over imagery, ensuring key data is visible in a spatial context.

Advantage - Insight

Easy-to-comprehend dashboards depicting reliability reviews, incidents, mean-time between failures and other key operating metrics provide true insights into operations. With this understanding, management can begin to identify patterns, set best practices and proactively initiate maintenance procedures. In addition, by consolidating operating results from multiple facilities, executives can compare and contrast operations and personnel to make better decisions and maximize results. These clear visuals are not only easy to comprehend, but are also simple to act on.

Benefit - Impact

With increased visibility into complex facilities, firms are far better positioned to make intelligent management decisions and reduce company risk. By maximizing production rates through increased up-time, you can expect to dramatically increase revenue and profit potential. Not only can you better avoid asset recovery expenses, but through reduced incidence of safety, health and environment issues, you can also reduce ancillary costs and uphold your corporate image within the community.

Management View

Business Objectives

To operate efficiently, plants are dependent on many highly critical operating conditions. Although various systems are deployed to track different aspects of these facilities, they are typically isolated from one another and inter-plant communication is limited at best. In addition, plant personnel often capture and manage critical data manually in local databases or spreadsheets.

By integrating data across operational groups and facilities and presenting data in highly-intuitive visual dashboard and report formats, Rolta enables you to increase efficiency, improve safety records, maximize profitability, and foster an environment of teamwork among plant personnel.

Solution

Rolta enables your organization to achieve operational intelligence by integrating data around four key areas: machinery reliability, human reliability, process reliability and asset maintenance. We leverage all critical sources of data, integrating with real-time systems and large, historical data sources as needed, to provide the results necessary for operations.

Our operational business intelligence solutions provide data and metrics to managers who need them and are available at any time. Information is presented through tabbed dashboards highlighting critical KPIs according to operational groupings. At-a-glance charts include drill-down and drill-to-detail functionality. The dashboard is also integrated with a trouble ticketing/commitment tracking function that allows you to ensure issues are being resolved appropriately.

Approach

Our expert consultants work with you to verify key KPIs for your business, focusing on critical failures that have high operational impact or economic consequences and ensure that data is included in your data model. We then build the ETL connectors to integrate critical data sources. This process eliminates ongoing data collection and consolidation efforts as data feeds are automated. Finally, we customize your enterprise dashboard, consolidating business operating metrics and presenting them in a format and at a level as needed to drive key operating decisions. By linking your BI solution to other internal systems, we enable you to take action on identified issues directly from your dashboard.

Business Value

This solution exposes your operational KPIs and enables you to monitor threshold violations on a real-time or near-real-time basis. As a result, you’re able to prevent issues before they significantly impact operations. With reliability levels at an all-time high, you can not only expect to increase revenue potential and save bottom-line dollars in potential production losses and repair costs, but you will also reduce safety and health issues, saving money and more importantly, lives.

Technical View

Technical Issues

Today’s industrial firms typically employ a myriad of operational systems, including Oracle, SAP, Maximo, Meridiam, Passport, AspenTech and more. With multiple disparate databases, data duplication and discrepancies are common and there is no central version of “truth.” Complicating the challenge, access to these systems is typically limited, further creating silos of information throughout the operation. When data is accessible, it is typically displayed in a series of numbers in an intractable format. Making meaningful sense of this data - when it is attempted at all - is a cumbersome, manual and time-intensive process.

By consolidating data from existing infrastructure and automating data feeds, Rolta eliminates your manual collection and consolidation efforts. Business operating metrics are consolidated and presented in a format and at a level needed to drive key operating decisions. Users can set and monitor threshold violations in real-time or near real-time status. A skilled systems integrator, Rolta can link your operational intelligence platform to other key systems, enabling management to take immediate action on KPIs.

Solution Components

An operational intelligence platform from Rolta includes:

A data warehouse serving as the consolidation point for all key metrics and conformed dimensions from various plant systems
A dashboard solution providing visual and interactive charts and graphs
Detailed reports providing root-cause analysis, accessible by direct drill-down from higher level interfaces including charts and graphs
GIS integration to further enhance visualization capabilities of a facility and its operating conditions
SOA and web service enablement to expose additional data sources to the integrated solution
Integrated security infrastructure to ensure proper levels of user access to data

Implementation

We implement your operational intelligence platform leveraging Rolta ’s standard BI project methodology, which begins with a comprehensive discovery effort. During this phase, we strive to fully understand your operating environment and your key business goals, as well as the deficiencies in your current solutions and systems. Based on the results obtained during discovery, a detailed plan is put into place which includes design, development, stabilization and production release of an appropriate Operational BI Solution to meet your needs.

How Does it fit and why is it different?

By implementing a Rolta Operational BI Solution, you benefit from:

A consistent, consolidated, central version of the truth in the operational Data Warehouse serviced by reliable and timely data collection interfaces.
Intuitive dashboards that include charts, graphs and other widgets to display KPIs in highly visual and interactive components
An integrated security infrastructure to ensure proper levels of user access to data
Visual tools that allow users from executives, to plant managers, to individual personnel the ability to view, act upon and impact key performance metrics
Realization of the true savings of money, lives and the preservation of the ecology by minimizing disruptive, disabling events within operating plants