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SAP Solution Brief

SAP® MANUFACTURING –
MANUFACTURING
INTELLIGENCE
DASHBOARDS
Manufacturing Intelligence with
SAP® Manufacturing

Production personnel are Working Smarter on the Shop Floor

hindered in their ability to To thrive in a world of global competition and demanding cus-
tomers, manufacturers must be able to sense and respond to
make rapid, right-time decisions
change, and adapt quickly and accurately to evolving condi-
on the factory floor by their tions. To a large extent, adaptability depends on a company’s
inability to gather relevant frontline production employees – and making sure those
information from disparate, employees are armed with the right information. To remove
stand-alone systems. Additional delays and errors from processes – and enable manufacturing to
work at the speed of the business – you need to give plant man-
challenges include the lack of
agers, quality inspectors, and production and maintenance
real-time alerts on shop floor supervisors the ability to identify and resolve problems rapidly,
exceptions, workflows to as they arise, and to monitor, measure, and improve manufac-
resolve them, and relevant turing performance over time.
key performance indicators for
In short, adaptiveness depends on being able to push decision
production processes.
making to the shop floor. But that’s often easier said than done.
At many companies, the various systems used for enterprise
Manufacturing intelligence resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution, and shop-
dashboards offered in the SAP® floor automation are not well integrated. Data is fragmented
across systems. There is little or no real-time information about
Manufacturing solution provide
production events available on the shop floor. And users cannot
configurable role-based entry easily access up-to-date reports and perform the rapid analyses
pages that deliver the visibility needed to evaluate and improve performance.
production personnel need to
be responsive to exceptions and
changes in demand or supply,
deliver superior performance,
and run manufacturing at the
speed of business.
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It’s an environment where plant managers and production • Integrated decision support for planning and execution, by
personnel are overloaded with data – but without ready access giving production personnel a clear understanding of the
to essential information about orders, labor, machines, material, current status of plant operations and the actions they can
and capacity. Pulling information together from disparate sys- take to keep performance levels high
tems is slow and difficult, and decision makers have to work
without a clear, up-to-date view of what is actually happening • Ready-to-use manufacturing and business content, such as key
in the plant. In short, production personnel are faced with a fun- performance indicators (KPIs) for production processes, which
damental lack of visibility into their manufacturing operations, can be configured and displayed to meet the user’s needs, as
which makes it difficult to understand and respond to change, well as the ability to draw real-time data from various
impairs their performance, and ultimately hampers the applications
company’s ability to meet customers’ needs.
• Sophisticated analytics and reporting tools that allow decision
Keeping Production People up to Speed makers to quickly recognize trends, detect potential problems,
To help manufacturers tackle those challenges – and empower analyze their root causes, and identify opportunities to improve
production personnel on the shop floor – SAP offers the SAP® production performance
Manufacturing solution with comprehensive, integrated capabili-
ties that include powerful manufacturing intelligence dashboards • Real-time exception detection and management, enabling
that deliver integrated, targeted information about the status of employees to monitor processes closely and address problems
the plant and production lines at a glance. quickly – before they have a negative impact on the customer

Manufacturing intelligence dashboards aggregate relevant With manufacturing intelligence dashboards, production per-
content from the full range of manufacturing systems (ERP, sonnel can easily monitor critical metrics, using the company’s
manufacturing execution, and shop-floor automation) into a custom reports or KPIs from a predefined library provided by
single, up-to-the-minute view of operations. By providing visibili- SAP. They can drill down on each KPI to analyze the cause and
ty into plant activities, these role-specific dashboards enable get to the bottom of problems. Responding to real-time alerts
employees to monitor and manage manufacturing performance in their dashboards, production personnel can trigger workflows
and respond quickly and effectively to changes. Automatic alerts in SAP ERP to resolve problems quickly.
inform decision makers when problems and exceptions arise in
production. They in turn can trigger automated workflows to The dashboards are designed to meet specific company needs and
resolve these before they become customer issues. fit in with established systems and processes. These dashboards
can be configured easily to track and display the metrics that
With the manufacturing intelligence dashboards offered in are important to your company, and users can personalize dash-
SAP Manufacturing, you can provide your production boards to enhance access to the information needed for their
personnel with: jobs.

• Content that is based on the individual’s role in the manufac- Manufacturing intelligence dashboards are integrated with SAP
turing process, which ensures that employees have the relevant solutions, such as SAP Business Intelligence, which ensures that
information needed to manage and make decisions in a format frontline employees have access to a full range of business infor-
they are comfortable with – while eliminating the overload of mation. Based on the open SAP NetWeaver™ platform, dashboards
extraneous data can be integrated easily with the SAP xApps™ portfolio of pack-
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aged composite applications and non-SAP systems as well, To Get Started . . .

providing the scalability to grow with changing business condi- With the manufacturing intelligence dashboards offered in
tions. Overall, this integrated, flexible approach ensures that the SAP Manufacturing, your production employees can have the
dashboards can meet your needs today and tomorrow – with a visibility into plant operations needed to increase responsiveness
low total cost of ownership. and performance. Dashboards can empower shop-floor decision
makers to act quickly and accurately, keeping your manufactur-
The Payoff of Empowered Employees ing operations in step with customers – and ahead of the
Manufacturing intelligence dashboards enable your production competition.
personnel to make rapid, accurate decisions on the factory floor,
and let your company: To find out how manufacturing intelligence dashboards – and
SAP Manufacturing – can help your company succeed in a fast-
• Execute production plans on time and within budget moving industry, visit www.sap.com/manufacturing
using real-time snapshots of factory and production-line
operations, sophisticated decision-support tools, and current
production-cost data

• Find and solve problems quickly and proactively with real-

time exception detection and alerts that highlight critical situa-
tions and automated workflows that let employees trigger the
right responses to issues as they arise

• Increase productivity and efficiency by giving employees

easy access to aggregated, targeted data from multiple, hetero-
geneous systems in a user-friendly format, configured to their
specific needs

• Keep improving manufacturing processes over time with

the ability to track KPIs; perform root-cause analyses; and
monitor, measure, and control production performance
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