Software Tools Tailored to Roles / Audience

I was watching "Channel 9" on TV the other night, you know the Microsoft community channel, I mean who doesn't right?  Anyway, there was a segment entitled "John Cook: Why and How People Use R".  The basis of the talk was why statisticians use R (a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics) to solve programming tasks.  The interesting thing to me is this talk was given from developer/programmer point of view; he was questioning why they would use that tool to solve a task verses Visual Studio.  He summarized with a couple of points:

• Users may have very different priorities than computer scientists
• Users will use a familiar tool when feasible

I think that these points extend beyond the roles of programmers and statisticians to the many roles of the manufacturing environment.  So what tool is best for the manufacturing environment? Making the assuming that most are not programmers, I would suggest that it needs to have the following qualities:

• Visual/Graphical in nature - if controlling an SOP, for example, it should have a workflow type interface
• Provides code abstraction - the ability to build things from "building blocks" of functionality.

Which tool is Right for You?

Why are Visual Code Development and Abstraction important?   Simply put, by using a tool with both of these qualities, processes can be rapidly developed  by existing subject matter experts (SMEs).  Furthermore, that system can be easily followed by many different roles within the organization which allows for collaboration and standardization. 

The Top 10 Workflow RFI/ RFP Questions (From the home office in Minnetonka, MN)

Anyone who has heard of comedian, David Letterman and his program, “The Late Show with David Letterman” is familiar with his “Top 10 List” segment. During this segment, Letterman or one of his celebrity guests recite a top 10 list of items in a particular category. These lists are said to originate, “From the home office in Wahoo, Nebraska” and contain the host’s humorous take on a current event or topic.

In the spirit of Letterman’s Top 10, Savigent is proud to bring you, “The Top 10 Workflow RFI/RFP Questions that you should be asking your MOM Vendor” from the home office in Minnetonka, MN:

1. Tell me about your product. Where has it been implemented? How it is being used? - These fundamental questions lead our Top 10 list because they provide an immediate indication of the nature of the product and help you determine if it’s an actual product or just a bunch of nice-looking slides and marketing material.

2. Will your product fit my business? – In asking this question, you are seeking to understand the configurability and adaptability of the vendor’s product. A number of software vendors claim that their product is configurable during the sales process, but their customers find out post-Purchase Order that the product requires changing their manufacturing process – an activity that is either not feasible given the cost and time constraints of the project or, more fundamentally, is not a desired project outcome. Your manufacturing process can be a source of competitive advantage for your business – why should automating all, or even a portion of it, require that process to fundamentally change?

3. Does your product comply with Industry standards like ISA-95? – While you may want to maintain the process underlying your automation effort, alternatively you may want to move it closer toward one of the applicable standards in the space such as ISA-95. Does the vendor support these types of standards? Can the vendor explain the intent behind the standards and help you assess how the standard can work for you?

4. Will your product help me leverage my existing MOM investments? – Often times, vendors will state, “Our product can replace that system” or “You can only realize the benefits you’re seeking if you use our product for all MOM functions”. Savigent offers you an option – we can either replace systems that exist within your portfolio of MOM solutions or we can help leverage them by building workflows around them, supplementing their functionality and user-interfaces, as necessary, to drive business results while not throwing away prior investment.

5. Can you integrate with my other related systems? – There are a number of related systems that can benefit from MOM data including ERP and MES applications. By asking this question, you are gauging the openness of the vendor’s product and the ease with which it can integrate with these existing systems.

6. Is your product scalable and ready to support my Enterprise? In response to this question, examine the vendor’s product architecture. Is it Service-oriented? Does it provide a set of re-useable services that can be throttled to meet increased demand? Moreover, are these services managed by the product or do you need an external management facility such as an Enterprise Service Bus to do so?

7. Can I use your product or will I need to hire “a bunch of IT guys” to help use it? – If a vendor’s automation solution requires a large investment in training and/or hiring within IT, will you realize the benefits that you are seeking? Put another way, are you really saving anything by automating if your IT spend goes up? Examine who uses the vendor’s system and the size of the support team at one of the vendor’s clients. Ask that client if the size of that support team is higher than what they had planned during their implementation.

8. How will your product help me drive actual improvement in my operations? How can I know that I am realizing results? – In examining the vendor’s product in regards to this question, you want to understand what data will be provided and, more importantly, how easy it is to turn that data into information through analysis and reporting. How easy is it to collect intelligence about your manufacturing operations that can be used to justify both your current and future investment within the space?

9. How long will it take to implement your product? – Can the vendor’s product be implemented in a matter of weeks versus months? How will the product be implemented? Will the vendor be working independently to get it installed and configured or will you be able to frequently view the solution as it is being constructed and offer input on to best build it to meet your needs?

And the final question of “The Top 10 Workflow RFI/RFP Questions that you should be asking your MOM Vendor” is…

10. What questions haven’t I asked that I should be asking? – While having this question last may seem anti-climactic, I’ll defend it on two accounts. First, a vendor that has experience in the MOM space is going to be forthright with questions that you may not have visibility to within your operation, but that are relevant to your future investment in the space. Second, and most importantly, a vendor that provides you with a list of questions is a potential partner who will help you improve your operation regardless of how it benefits them. Anyone know of such a company?

Did I miss a key question? Disagree with any of the above? If so, I would love to hear from you. I can be reached at “the home office” at mike.stuedemann@savigent.com

Leveraging Workflow Automation to Drive Operational Intelligence

We published a new brief today focused the application of workflow automation in the manufacturing environment to drive operational intelligence. The brief, titled “Leveraging Workflow Automation to Drive Operational Intelligence” can be found on Savigent’s web site at http://savigent.com/.

The three part brief includes thought provoking research by Gartner analysts Simon Jacobson and Leif Eriksen.  Their research highlights the “demand for efficient and effective tools and technologies” that manufacturers need to make more effective and accurate decisions.  And manage business processes to “close the feedback loop of corporate performance back to the plant level to drive the right behaviors.”

It also provides a practical understanding of workflow automation and an introduction to Savigent’s industry leading software, Catalyst Workflow.  We also show how we are applying workflow automation to drive change within a manufacturing operation – through Incident Management.  Incident Management is a powerful workflow-based system available to support continuous improvement efforts in the manufacturing environment. It puts some rigor around the business processes that define how manufacturers respond when problems occur.

To tackle Complexity we need to Simplify

This is second installment in the series of posts related to Reactive Agents. The first can be found here: http://blog.savigent.com/2012/05/merovingian-or-simple-explanation-of.html

When the scientific community began work on autonomous robots and artificial intelligence, it ran into a very large obstacle – the world is complex. As it turns out, the best model of the world is the world itself, and we lack the ability to describe it in any form that computers can execute.

With all of our technology for planning, learning, natural language processing and other AI techniques, early robots were very unimpressive creatures. And while a lot can be attributed to the hardware platforms and sensors that we used, the main problem was (and remains) that deduction is slow and complicated!
Even today with all the advancements in hardware and sensors like LIDAR, vision and GPS – robots are still primitive. All the military drones we see and read about are nothing more than remote controlled toys with the over horizon control capabilities, where all the real intelligence is coming from the human operator.
To tackle the complexity problem Rodney A. Brooks proposed that Artificial Intelligence should not be an attempt to build "human level" intelligence directly into machines. Rather, citing evolution as an example, he asserted that we should first create simpler intelligences, and gradually build on the lessons learned from these, working our way up to more complex behaviors.
Brooks’ architecture was designed to provide all the functionality displayed by lower level life forms, namely insects. Using a common house fly as an example, Brooks claimed that creatures with this level of intelligence have attributes that resemble closely connected networks of sensors and actuators, with pre-wired patterns of behavior and simple navigation techniques – they are "deterministic machines".

For the software savvy people reading this, the key concepts present in Brooks’ architecture are that:

• Intelligent behavior does not require explicit representations – we don’t have to model the world to build an intelligent system
• Intelligent behavior does not require abstract (symbolic) reasoning – our systems don’t have to think to be intelligent
• Intelligence is an emergent property of certain complex systems – at some level of complexity systems will become intelligent

We can use Finite State Machines to model the behavior of individual system participants
The architecture provides these capabilities through the use of a combination of simple machines with no central control, no shared representation, slow switching rates and low bandwidth communication. Putting this into modern software system jargon – it’s like many simple computing cores in a massively parallel configuration, each running a Finite State Machine.

Reactive agents are the building blocks of such architecture:

• They are situated in the world – they are instances and not classes, they are things
• They interact directly with the world through sensors and actuators – there are no layers, implementation uses direct connectivity to minimize reaction time and implementation overhead
• They can also interact directly with each other – this interaction is not different than their interaction with the world

A system of reactive agents exists with no overarching models and agents have no knowledge of other agents. Reactive agents simply have to process all incoming signals and based on their internal algorithms and their internal state optionally set outgoing signals.

iRobot’s Roomba is a modern example of a robot using this technic. We can easily identify reactive agents that:

• Stop the motor and back out when the bumper sensor is triggered
• Signal the robot to find the charging station or go back to work based on the battery sensor
• Navigate robot back to the charging station using light beacon when charging is required

Software systems in general and manufacturing systems specifically are complex and suffer from the same problems that exist in robotics and AI software. When we developed Catalyst Platform, we used the very best concepts from reactive agent architecture and functionality, and translated them into a comprehensive solution for event-driven, reactive agent-based software development platform. In the next installment I will cover how our patented technology translates reactive agents from the world of robotics into world of distributed software systems.

Catalyst System Management Provides Centralized Management

Chances are that you reading this article via your favorite RSS reader, in my case, Flipboard. Or perhaps you were pulled in via LinkedIn or Twitter. No matter the exact method, there is a common thread among all of these; simply put, you wanted to avoid manually checking all or your favorite websites independently. Like many users, as you come across something interesting, you add it to your favorite aggregator - you did add us right? Once you are subscribed (or following), the magic happens; you can read content from hundreds of blogs and sites from a single interface. Think of the time that you save by having all of that data pulled to you – no need to visit them separately.

So, why I am highlighting some of points of social media (besides a shameless plug – again, you are following or subscribing, right)? The recent release of Savigent’s Catalyst Platform™ offers several benefits – one that I would like to highlight is the addition of Catalyst System Management™ to the Platform. This tool allows you to browse, monitor and maintain your Catalyst Platform™ in one central place. Think of your assets (or nodes) on the plant floor, as websites/blogs, you might have hundreds… System Management allows to you to keep in touch, without typing URLs each time or physically going to the asset.

That is just the beginning, unlike a simple RSS feed, Catalyst System Management™ allows for interaction with the assets on the Platform. You can configure node data, push updates of code/configuration data, and monitor system health in real time. Think of the time that you will save in managing your system… But a word of caution, similar to using a RSS reader, you might just find yourself getting addicted to the information!

Bull Durham and Catalyst Platform: Composite Applications

This summer is the 25th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite movies. Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham is the classic story of minor league baseball player, “Crash” Davis, an aging veteran who is sent to the minor leagues to help train a flashy young pitcher, Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh” in the ways of professional baseball. In the process, he meets and falls in love with a die hard baseball fan, Annie Savoy; who, unfortunately for “Crash” has already taken a romantic interest in young “Nuke”.

While there are number of memorable scenes, one of the best involves Annie discussing her beliefs on love. In educating both “Crash” and “Nuke” on her beliefs, she talks about how matters of the heart are really out of our control and more a matter of quantum physics. As “Crash” rises to leave, stating that after all of his time in minors he doesn’t believe in trying out; Annie asks, “Well, what do you believe in?”

After “Crash” replies with a soliloquy that covers the designated hitter, the JFK Assassination, good scotch and “deep, slow wet kisses that last three days”, “Nuke” replies, “Hey Annie – what’s all this molecule stuff?”

So, what does this have to with Savigent’s recent release of Catalyst Platform? While this release provides a number of features, many of the features appear, on the surface, to offer only technical benefit. While my co-authors will address the benefits of these features in future posts, some users may be a little like “Nuke” in the scene mentioned above asking, “What’s all this technical stuff?”

In an effort to demonstrate that there’s more than just technical benefit to our new release, I want to highlight a feature that can deliver immediate business results – composite applications. Simply, a composite application is an “application” built of other applications. As “mash-ups” of the service-oriented development world, composite applications are built using re-usable components that can quickly be rearranged in response to changing business priorities and conditions. The ability to build composite applications and reuse components across them within Catalyst Platform will allow our clients to build architectures that are flexible, adaptable and extensible. More importantly, when coupled with an iterative development approach, composite applications built on the Catalyst Platform will allow customers to develop applications more quickly leading to a faster return on their investment.

Given the dynamic nature of today’s manufacturing environment, leading software providers have to provide tools that facilitate faster, more scalable development. Catalyst Platform creates the foundation to meet this challenge. That’s what I believe – in case Annie asks…

Savigent’s Catalyst Platform v4.0 Lays Foundation for Migration to Windows Azure

Includes new Catalyst Bus™ with real-time information access via OData services
MINNETONKA, Minn. – July 17, 2012 – Savigent Software, Inc., the Minnetonka-based company specializing in event-driven manufacturing operations management software, announced today the release of Catalyst Platform™ version 4.0. The updated version delivers significant enhancements to the software, most notably a fully managed infrastructure for the development, deployment and management of composite applications. Catalyst Platform™ also provides a central repository for revision controlled management of composite applications and a new, highly scalable Catalyst Bus™ with real-time information access via OData services.

Michael Feldman, company CTO, said, “The release of Catalyst Platform™ lays a foundation for the migration of the entire Catalyst suite to Windows Azure and provides significant new functionality that supports enterprise-wide development, deployment and management of composite applications in data centers, and private and public clouds.”

Catalyst Platform™ is the foundation of Savigent’s expanding Catalyst™ suite of software products. The software dramatically simplifies the development and management of highly scalable service-oriented software solutions in the manufacturing environment. It combines three powerful capabilities into one software product: a composite application development framework, a unifying service architecture and a managed execution environment.

The enhancements present in Catalyst Platform™ version 4.0 provide users with significantly increased functionality, flexibility and simplicity. Catalyst Platform™ provides a central repository for revision controlled management of composite applications and their configuration, and managed deployment to the Catalyst environment for execution. Catalyst Bus™ extends the Service Oriented Architecture of Catalyst Platform™ by implementing standardized service patterns for commonly used interactions in the environment. Data within the Catalyst Bus™ is available in real-time via OData services. Catalyst Development Studio™ provides a visually intuitive environment for the assembly of composite applications from highly configurable, prebuilt agents.

Jay Mellen, Savigent’s executive vice president of business development, remarked, “This is a very exciting release with loads of new, differentiating functionality. For example, Catalyst Bus™ dramatically simplifies service implementations and it is OData accessible, so domain experts and IT professionals can access information quickly and easily using a wide variety of applications tailored to meet their needs. And we are continuing to keep our entire product line on the leading edge of Microsoft technologies, with support for Microsoft .NET 4.0, SQL Server 2012, SharePoint 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Azure.”

With this the release of Catalyst Platform™, Savigent is rebranding its entire Catalyst suite of software products. Catalyst Workflow™ delivers a controlled system for workflow automation, providing manufacturers with guaranteed compliance, unparalleled traceability and rich manufacturing intelligence. Catalyst Historian™ provides manufacturers with a real-time, context-aware data historian, in addition to a comprehensive data analysis tool.

Founded in 1994, Savigent Software has pioneered a new class of event-driven manufacturing operations management software. The company currently serves manufacturers in a variety of industries including automotive, semiconductor, industrial, specialty chemical, consumer packaged goods, and aerospace and defense. Customers served by Savigent are seeking increased efficiencies, agile control of manufacturing assets, and improved process control and product quality. The company also serves OEMs and independent software vendors by providing value-added software solutions for their products. Its Catalyst™ suite of products provides solutions for workflow automation, manufacturing intelligence and systems integration.

More information about Savigent Software can be found at savigent.com. Read about manufacturing operations management on our Level3 blog at blog.savigent.com. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/savigent.