Enterprise Integration

The objective is to bring live information from manufacturing processes, so-called "production actuals," up into the decision-making processes that drive day-to-day operations at large manufacturers such as those for the aerospace and automotive sectors. This is production-to-enterprise integration. The concept is to use production equipment as reporters, directly, so that people with clipboards don’t have to note problems or discrepancies.

The goal of this project is to validate how well proposed standards can help to integrate CNC machines as cohesive components into the factory. The project will focus on new business opportunities, where real-time CNC data collection can be used to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) of discrete parts machinery within the enterprise, for inventory, asset management and workflow processes. This project will assist in the development of multi-industry, cost-effective yet scalable data integration solutions. This solves two problems: it makes production data immediately available to other enterprise systems, such as inventory or ordering, cutting down on needless delays; and it eliminates errors from repetitive hand-copying of clipboard data. Ford Motor Company estimated that on average, each element of manufacturing data is hand-entered 10 times. Our vision is succinctly put by the University of Cincinnati: “OHIO – Only Handle Information Once.”