Looking beyond the illusion of improvement with Enterprise Performance Management

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) dashboards that rely on ERP data and traditional data warehouse approaches are only creating the illusion of increased responsiveness. According to AMR Research.Colin Masson.

"Manufacturing portals, which neither relate plant performance to customer demands or supplier performance nor add the dimension of costs, propagate the gap between manufacturing and the business," comments AMR’s Colin Masson, in this week’s company bulletin.

A recent AMR Research survey of 250 Chemicals buyers and suppliers highlighted that suppliers’ demands for real-time inventory and pricing visibility are still not being met. Performance-Driven Enterprises can trace latency in inventory visibility as a significant contributor to expediting costs, schedule deviations, and product variability.

"Lack of shared visibility of maintenance and production scheduling effects on customer commitments and sourcing requirements has also become a significant reason for reliability-centered maintenance programs and real-time monitoring of production-constraining events," says Masson.

He adds that performance-driven enterprises, such as Dow Corning and Eastman Chemicals, are standardizing their real-time infrastructure investments to complement their ERP systems, arriving at a single, timely version of the truth that can be understood and leveraged across their organization.

"Out of these investments come benefits such as common plant and product definitions as well as the tools to transform and contextualize real-time data for business, engineering, and maintenance use," he observes.

Meanwhile, new Web services and Business Process Management (BPM) promise new plug and play software assembly environments that construct business processes from (Web) service-oriented applications, without the traditional barriers of heterogeneous platforms and proprietary protocols/standards.