Software targets overall equipment effectiveness

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 23, 2005

CitectIIM Performance provides powerful analytical capabilities that enable companies to increase profits by proactively targeting performance improvements in overall equipment effectiveness.

Citect has launched CitectIIM Performance, the first manufacturing execution system (MES) to provide powerful analytical capabilities that enable companies to increase profits by proactively targeting performance improvements in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).

CitectIIM Performance is a powerful solution that is easy to implement, intuitive to use and provides fast ROI as a result of achieving gains in machine and equipment uptimes, production and total capacity.

These gains are the result of the depth of qualitative, real-time information captured by the system, and its unique cause-based analysis function.

Qualitative data entered by engineers, regarding issues such as downtime, equipment failures or out-of-spec quality problems, is automatically captured at the time of the event occurrence.

The data is then aggregated, analysed and presented in real time, in an easy-to-understand snapshot, throughout the plant or enterprise.

This eliminates guesswork on behalf of managers, enabling them to confidently target and improve areas that will yield the greatest returns.

CitectIIM Performance offers additional advantages in that it is modular and noninvasive, and is scaleable from the smallest to the largest plants; thus providing enterprise-wide solutions for benchmarking and total capacity gains.

In addition, as IIM solutions mould to a customer's processes, companies don't need to change their existing performance measures.

This flexibility also enables the system to support multiple languages and to leverage Microsoft's latest technologies - it runs on Windows 2003 as well as Windows 2000 and includes integrated Windows security so the user need only log on once.

Prior to its UK launch, CitectIIM Performance has been proven with world-class customers in the mining, food and beverage, energy, automotive and infrastructure industries.

In one application, Western Mining Corporation Resources reported returns within days, achieving a 24% performance improvement in the company's underground railway haulage as part of its mine reliability programme.

In another, Impala's Base Metal Refinery in South Africa, reported savings in downtime, an hour of which is equivalent to SAR 1 million.

"CitectIIM gives management a clear picture on production performance throughout the plant, by aggregating data from various systems and presenting an analysed, easy-to-understand snapshot", said Tim Spandiel, Plant Manager, Impala Platinum Holdings.

"Citect is committed to delivering high ROI and easy-to-use solutions to its customers world-wide", said Paul Hurst Of Citect UK.

"We expect so see continuous growth for our suite of IIM products during 2005, especially as they are part of a rapidly growing 'next generation' MES market which industry analysts, the ARC Advisory Group, predict will be worth approximately $3 billion by 2008".

Craig Resnick, ARC Advisory Group Research Director added: "OEE is a straight-forward approach to monitoring and managing the lifecycle of manufacturing assets".

"OEE is a useful, but still underused metric based on the multiplication of a plant's production rate, yield, and utilisation".

"This metric should be adopted by manufacturers as part of their KPIs and real-time performance management initiatives".