Information toolkit drills down to plant

Some two years in its development, a new PC-based management information tool from Industrial Electronic Automation (IEA) is said to provide plant and production managers with a deceptively simple graphical overview of a plant's performance.

Unlike traditional MIS and MES systems, which can generate huge amounts of unsorted data, the ICEberg toolkit can selectively present collected data as three-dimensional histograms.

Using an approach first proposed by PA Consulting, ICEberg analyses any business process against the three basic parameters of rate, utilisation and yield. The product of these three fundamentals gives a factor dubbed `occupacity', which can be determined for an entire operation, a process or plant, a piece of machinery, or even an individual's performance.

At the `tip of the ICEberg', therefore, is a simple three-line display of business performance showing the current position - mean and high and low points - compared with, say, the average for the last three months. Clearly, while such simple graphs are useful for monitoring progress, they are not detailed enough to analyse problems and identify solutions. But the beauty of ICEberg is that all the necessary detail is only a mouse-click away. By `drilling down' through successive levels of detailed plant and production measurements, underlying trends can be identified and improvements made.

The detailed information is displayed as 3D stacked bar graphs in `cubes' generated using Oracle's Express on-line analytical tool.