Owen Plowman's blog

We talk a lot, at Actenum, about the application of our optimization technology to planning and scheduling situations in asset-intensive industries. I often use both terms in conversations with others without making any formal distinction between them. Yet there are important differences, and so some explanation is in order.

Stop and think for a moment: how do you make a decision?

The Digital Oilfield and the Intelligent Grid: two initiatives in different areas—Energy and Utilities—that focus on improved monitoring and management of the entire production value chain. In other industries too, there’s a buzz about putting more intelligence into operations. By making devices smarter, using sophisticated communication technologies, and employing software tools to gather, integrate, and present information to decision-makers in an appropriate way, the thinking goes, you’ll empower them to manage their operations more effectively.

When you examine SAP’s Perfect Plant initiative (there’s an overview in my earlier post), you’ll find that part of the journey to better alignment of production performance with enterprise objectives is concerned with focusing attention on three key areas: asset performance, operational scheduling and planning, and manufacturing execution.

Recently, I attended the SAP Adaptive Manufacturing Summit in San Francisco, CA. From my perspective, one of the more interesting topics discussed, and the subject of several presentations, was the “Perfect Plant” initiative, introduced by SAP earlier this year.