A New Era in Mill Analytics: Easy and Effective Ways to Improve Production Management Decisions, PaperCon 2014

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Recent advances in the methods used to collect, store, and visualize process and product data are revolutionizing the way mills analyze their cost structure and assess the performance of assets operating across their enterprises. Traditionally, the first step in getting answers to questions on asset performance; “what is the variable cost of production; by grade, by run, across multiple assets for a given customer?”, begins with a request for support from a business analyst or someone in IT. Unfortunately the need to recruit resources to help locate, aggregate, and filter these data can be a factor in determining both the number and type of questions asked by the folks in production and operations management. But that is all about to change! Today getting answers to the questions like that are as easy as booking a flight on Expedia. The value of extracting and analyzing data framed around a set of contextual relationships is not lost on those familiar with on-line tools like Expedia. You simply ask questions of the data from within the context of your specific situation-”show me flights on Delta, leaving Atlanta after 9AM and arriving in Boston before 3PM”. With a little planning your real time data infrastructure can be designed to deliver this same sort of ‘self-serve’ experience to your process engineers, production managers and operating executives.