Delivering true business performance is a multi-stage journey, where the first step is the implementation of real-time business intelligence, providing real-time business measurements that are effectively visualized and made available to every key function in the organisation. These baseline elements, once developed and implemented in an industrial operation, provide the foundation that enables real-time manual feedback control.
The next step is to bring critical business variables under automatic control within each plant and across the industrial enterprise. The process of bringing the critical business variables of production value, energy cost, material cost, environment and safety under automated feedback control is referred to as enterprise control.
This automated approach is critical in addressing business variables which fluctuate so rapidly that it is very difficult for operators to control manually. Humans also tend to have difficulty with business variables that respond too slowly to changes they make, where technologies such as online simulators can go into fast forward mode and immediately let the operator know what the impact of the change will be when it has worked through the process.
Once these automatic business control loops are implemented, your organization can move to the final stage – real-time profit optimization.