So What about Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center?
Posted by Amit K. Singh on October 22, 2008
In my last few posts, I have raised some questions about the inability of Manufacturing IT systems to deliver on ROI.
I have also talked about why that happened historically and how things have changed in last few years. I outlined that the key to deliver on ROI is to provide information that the manufacturing users can use to improve the process, cut down the cost and/or improve quality and flexibility.
I articulated why it’s not that easy to build a solution that can do that, the challenges in building an effective solution for Operational Intelligence.
How to deliver on the promise of Operational Intelligence
The question now comes, so what about Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center, a product that we built here at Oracle and a product that I continue to manage. Well, this is not a blog of Oracle’s strategy and roadmap but more about my views in this space. So, I’ll keep it limited to the publically available information.
Managing Automation writes about Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center
First and foremost, yes MOC is the same as Manufacturing Hub, Manufacturing Operations Hub or Manufacturing Transaction Hub. This is the Hub product for manufacturing or plant information. But the official name of the product is Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center.
And yes, we did address almost the entire criterion I laid down in my earlier post about an effective Operational Intelligence solution. Oracle is in a unique position to offer a solution like Mfg Operations Center simply because we bring together a set of world class technologies such as
- Data integration tools such as Oracle Warehouse Builder and Oracle Data Integrator
- Shop floor communication technology, OPC and all proprietary drivers that can help connect with real-time data sources such as equipments, PLCs and SCADA systems. We have partnered with a number of different partners who bring decades of experience and expertise in this area. First and foremost among them is Kepware who worked with Oracle closely to enhance their solution and elevate it for enterprise connectivity.
- Data warehousing and Business Intelligence techniques to make the information easy to report on.
- Visualization tools that can present the information to users in an easy to use manner.
- Data mining and predictive analytics that help diagnose the problem proactively.
However, Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center is not just a re-packaging of existing technologies. We spent close to 2 years in building the necessary ingredients to offer an easily deployable solution.
- A data model that is generic enough to apply for different types of manufacturing industries and extensible enough to model different types of shop floor environments
- Variety of data collection mechanisms including provisions for manual collection of data.
- Variety of data cleansing and data classification mechanisms including manual approaches.
Manufacturing Operations requires a long term vision and architecture. It’s a journey instead of a specific destination. The objective is not to implement a system but build an information foundation that can be used to run continuous improvement programs such as Lean and Six Sigma. Manufacturing Operations Center can be an important step in that journey for you. For us, the journey continues as we continue to flesh out the data model, expand the data sources we can gather data from including manual data collection, and add valued added capabilities on top such as ‘Close Loop Scheduling’.
