Leveraging Operational Data for Competitive Advantage: How a Data Infrastructure Strategy Enables Smart Manufacturing

As advances in instrumentation, mobility, production processes, and networks make data more prevalent within manufacturing, the integration and modeling of information from across these varied sources is becoming a critical differentiator for improving process productivity, quality, asset reliability, EHS and energy performance.  Although many technology providers have their own applications to access and store the related data, it is often only available to meet very specific and limited functional needs.  When data is recognized as a critical asset and managed as part of an infrastructure, however, it can become a key enabler to help transform the entire operations.  By making all process and production data available, and providing information in a context model based on functional needs, manufacturers can drive improved results against their critical business impacts.  This presentation will introduce the concept of a data infrastructure and show how a related strategy can help deliver operational intelligence to enable real-time action and decisions, provide a common platform for analysis, and establish standardized KPIs to measure and evaluate ongoing performance.

Presenter:

2a24f00Lance Fontaine

OSIsoft, Industry Principle, Metals and Mining

Knoxville, TN, USA

Lance Fountaine joined OSIsoft in October 2013 as an Industry Principal for the Metals and Mining industry following a 20 year career in the aluminum business with Alcoa Global Primary Metals.

In his last assignment before leaving Alcoa, Lance was accountable for the global development and deployment of common, best practice Manufacturing Applications, as well as the supporting computing infrastructure.  The renewed focus and resulting strategy led to the adoption of a SMART Manufacturing program across the global enterprise.  This program was based on the PI System as an information infrastructure to support efforts for continuous improvement, operational excellence and ongoing business sustainability.

After joining Alcoa as an electrical engineer in 1993, Lance held a number of positions within the company providing process control, manufacturing and IT services at the location, region and enterprise level.  In addition to his technicalexperience, Lance has also led efforts to consolidate IT and OT functions into a common organizational model supporting the current convergence in computing technology.

Lance was a Presidential Scholar at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY.  He graduated with a Bachelors of Science degree Electrical Engineering in 1991 and returned to get his Masters of Science in Electrical Power in 1993 as a research associate for Niagara Mohawk.

Outside of work, Lance spends a majority of his time with his wife and two sons.  He is very active in sports, and has also served as a coach for minor hockey, baseball and football in the Knoxville area.  In addition to sports, Lance and his family also enjoy academics and traveling.

This forum will be moderated by SyracuseCoE Executive Director, Ed Bogucz.

Video:

 

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