Citect launches software to up equipment efficiency
aims to increase profits by targeting equipment efficiency.
CitectIIM Performance is a Manufacturing Execution System that is said to be the first to provide analytics capabilities that enable companies to increase profits by proactively targeting performance improvements in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
It is the first of Citect's suite of IIM Solutions to be packaged as an out-of-the-box product. The system lowers total cost of ownership by combining technology, services and process improvement expertise accumulated from working with world-class customers such as Impala, Console Energy and BHP Billiton - the company claims.
The end result is said to be an out-of-the-box solution that is easy to configure, intuitive to use and provides fast ROI in areas such as increased uptime, production and total capacity gains.
The Australian-based company's customer base revolves around a number of major industries, including the food and beverage sector, which has been amongst the first to take up on the technology.
"What makes CitectIIM Performance unique is its powerful cause-based analysis", explained Peter Long, general manager, CitectIIM. "This is due to the depth of detailed information captured. For example, Performance automatically captures qualitative data entered by engineers at the time of event occurrence such as a downtime, equipment failure or out-of-spec quality issue.
"By aggregating and presenting such information in real time throughout the plant or enterprise, Performance eliminates the guesswork, providing managers with direction to confidently target and improve areas which will yield the greatest returns."
ARC Advisory Group currently predicts for such software that the market will be worth approximately $3 billion by 2008 according to their two recent CPM studies.
Craig Resnick, ARC Advisory Group research director said, "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, (RPM) initiatives."
The company, which has just announced full year results showing triple-digit growth in revenues for the second consecutive year, says it is set to launch new products during the course of this year.
