There are two things I am always curious about when someone talks to me about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)--how do you know what to display, and how do you tie it to "real" data. I talked recently to Wayne Morris, former CEO of Citect who is now CEO of a startup company--MyDials. I believe the "Dials" part comes from the dashboard display. The new company is based in Lafayette, Colo., but its roots reach to Australia, the home of Citect from whom came much of the management team and programmers.
The differentiator for MyDials begins with the application being Software as a Service otherwise known as "on-demand" or "cloud computing." This type of application is hosted at a central location, usually the vendor's. The advantages of this include ease of installation and upgrade. Typically users only need an Internet connection and a browser, or at most a small resident application. MyDials second differentiator lies in its data sources. Morris says that it collects both business and operations metrics. It includes "methodologies and processes to make it an operational performance improvement platform, and not just a dashboard with nice visuals," says Morris.
MyDials has the ability to pull and combine data from sources such as manufacturing execution systems, data historians and other production data repositories on one side and enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management sources on the other.
New technologies have little value if the company lacks a way to market them. MyDials is trying a unique system of partnering with performance improvement consulting firms. Nine such firms have already signed on. The company will also market direct to the user.
I relate this to a blossoming trend begun with Invensys' InFusion, which also is blending production and business data with the idea of empowering operators and other personnel to make business decisions along with their operations decisions. The companies' markets are different, but the underlying idea is similar. And I think that both are going in the right direction to meet the needs of today's manufacturing--that is, to bring manufacturing into a better relationship with its corporate owners.
8:40:13 AM 
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