Managing Automation - December 2007 - (Page 26) [ COVER STORY ] At Freescale, the Spotfire Visualization tool from TIBCO presents near real-time data for engineers to analyze in order to correct conditions that may be reducing production yields. products, has begun using the WebFOCUS technology to deliver real-time reports to supply and logistics network managers. The reports tell them how well the company is doing at filling customer orders. When users launch a request for fill-rate information, the system retrieves data from several transactional systems and assembles it on the fly, says Jim Honerkamp, the company’s CIO. The real-time reports, Honerkamp says, are important to Hillman because the company has service-level agreements in place with many of its customers requiring 99% fill rates. Recognizing quickly when the company may be in danger of missing fill-rate targets can save Hillman big money. In fact, Honerkamp says, last year Hillman recouped $130,000 from one of its largest vendors because, with realtime information, it was able to prove it had satisfied its fill-rate promises when the customer believed Hillman hadn’t. “Operational BI has reduced “In many cases, before we had the [operthe time between us identifying ational BI] tool, it could be days to weeks a business issue and identifying the solution,” Honerkamp says. before we spotted a problem with fill “In many cases, before we had rates.” — Jim Honerkamp, Hillman Group the tool, it could be days to weeks before we spotted a problem with fill rates. problem. Or, if we did, it might have taken Now, because we can put the tool in the an engineer manually putting together the hands of operational end users, the time analysis over weeks, if not months,” says Alan frame is often minutes or hours.” Yost, an IT manager in Freescale’s computer Accelerating queries, however, doesn’t do integrated manufacturing group. much to improve the way traditional BI enviSimilar in-memory analytical tools include ronments extract data from transaction sysCognosNow and TM1 from Applix Inc. Aptems and load it into analytical data stores. plix was recently acquired by Cognos. And in many environments, that is the part of Another emerging class of tools, dubbed the process that is most batch-oriented and enterprise information integration (EII), takes contributes the most latency, experts say. a slightly different approach to enabling the A host of BI vendors are beginning to attack that piece of the puzzle as well, however. BI software vendor Teradata, for example, has added a real-time data loader to its data warehouse environment. Using publish-and-subscribe integration tools, such as IBM’s MQ Series, the real-time data loader connects to transactional systems and downloads data from them in real time. The data is stored in temporary tables in the Teradata data warehouse where it can be used to generate real-time dashboards or analysis. Freescale Semiconductor, a $6.4 billion semiconductor manufacturer, is using Teradata’s real-time data loading capabilities in combination with an in-memory data analysis tool to quickly deliver insights to yield engineers tracking the efficiency of the company’s manufacturing processes around the world. Every day, 50 gigabytes of data from semiconductor test and production machines flows continuously into the company’s Teradata data warehouse. There, it can be accessed in near real time by engineers using DXP 2.0, an in-memory analytical tool from start-up vendor Spotfire Inc., which was recently acquired by TIBCO Software Inc. The Spotfire tool pulls the near real-time test data from the Teradata database, allowing engineers to analyze, visualize, and correct conditions that may be reducing Freescale’s manufacturing yields. Recently, for example, Freescale engineers were able, within hours, to isolate a particular semiconductor yield problem to one of three chambers in a wafer fabrication tool and fix it. That kind of quick response is critical for Freescale, which, like all technology manufacturers, contends with evershrinking product life spans. “Before, we might never have found the ma December 26 2007
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