February 15, 2010 — Mitsubishi Electric Automation announced the addition of the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center to its e-F@ctory manufacturing solution.e-F@ctory is Mitsubishi Electric’s vision for manufacturing that unifies its control hardware and networks with enterprise IT systems offered by strategic partner companies, including IBM, Microsoft and now, Oracle. Mitsubishi Electric is the first hardware vendor with an Oracle tested and approved connection to the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center.Monitoring stock and usage can also increase the efficiency by keeping track of products that have been made and automatically creating new part and product orders according to up-to-the minute on-hand quantities.
And when information can flow seamlessly between the plant floor and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, production can increase without expensive expansion. In fact, up to 65 percent increase in efficiency has been realized when using an e-F@ctory solution. e-F@ctory’s enterprise connectivity solution offers numerous advantages over traditional data collection methods and is built to handle high levels of data processing and interaction, not just today, but for the future. As more and more manufacturers use IT systems to remain competitive in the manufacturing space, increasing amounts of shop floor information exchange are required.
Without e-F@ctory, the sheer volume of data collection and exchange required would overwhelm the control systems and force costly retrofit or clumsy work-around solutions.Traditional solutions used today may include open control (OPC) servers, SCADA software, and Excel spreadsheets, or other business applications. Data collection and database connectivity between the business and plant floor was not their intended design. These solutions require complex infrastructures, often with multiple PCs on the floor which need to be constantly maintained and protected. Such multi-layer architecture has many possible points of failure and is can be very difficult to implement and maintain.
