How EMI And BI Drive Operational Performance For Your Manufacturing Clients

By Peter Guilfoyle, Vice President of Marketing, Northwest Analytics

To be able to leverage enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) and business intelligence (BI), it is importance to understand what each brings to the table for a manufacturer. Do you know the differences between enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) and business intelligence (BI)? Are they interchangeable? Complementary? How do you know when to leverage one or the other and why do so?  The answer is an important one for the modern-day manufacturer that wants to better leverage their existing technologies and process data to improve competitive positioning, increase output, and lower risk.

But while both EMI and BI each deal with information about the organization, they are distinctly different in their approach to gathering and analyzing that information, and different in the value they present. They are separate approaches to meeting different needs. The primary goal of EMI is to turn large amounts of manufacturing process data into real knowledge and drive business results based on that knowledge.

Enterprise manufacturing intelligence, or simply manufacturing intelligence, applies to software used to bring a corporation's manufacturing process-related data together from many sources for the purposes of reporting, analysis, visual summaries, and passing data between enterprise-level and plant systems. Data combined from multiple sources can be given a new structure or context that helps users find what they need regardless of where it came from.  It leverages a suite of reporting and analysis tools, interfaces, and dashboards designed to deliver contextual, localized, role-based information to help improve systems and processes. 

Often times manufacturing intelligence strategies operate in tandem with BI systems, a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to business process data to help enterprise users make better business decisions, cut related costs and identify new business opportunities.

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