Activplant Releases Manufacturing Performance Management White Paper

Solving the Downtime Dilemma - 5 Reasons to Look Beyond Your Top 10 Downtime List

London, ON – June 12, 2008 Activplant Corporation, the standard in performance management solutions for the world’s leading manufacturers, announces the release of its latest white paper: Solving the Downtime Dilemma: 5 Reasons to Look Beyond Your Top 10 Downtime List.

This latest white paper by Activplant Corporation (http://www.activplant.com) is based on several customer case studies focusing on downtime reporting. The white paper, the second in a series of performance management research pieces conducted by Dennis Cocco, Activplant Chief Product Strategist, uses before and after examples to show how concentrating solely on downtime can be misleading and cause manufacturers to waste resources needlessly by fixing the wrong problems leading to what is know as the downtime dilemma.

According to the white paper, ‘A new direction in thinking addresses this dilemma. It holds that focusing only on downtime means that other, equally impactful measures of productivity are overlooked. And furthermore, concentrating on downtime to the exclusion of these other indicators can actually mislead manufacturing management – resulting in flat plant productivity and the possible waste of precious, limited resources.’ Today’s manufacturers need to look at their plant productivity and continuous improvement efforts from a system wide approach that results in improved operational performance that is cost efficient.

"In today’s global market space, manufacturers need to have the right information versus volumes of data to make sound business decisions,” said Chuck Frosst, president of Activplant Corporation. “Throughput analysis allows managers to understand what is happening on the entire plant floor and where to concentrate their improvement efforts. The goal is to either increase production throughput as efficiently as possible or to sustain the same throughput but at lower costs; Activplant’s Throughput Analyzer provides the clarity to make the right decisions about the entire line performance to accomplish this. At the end of the day it’s about improving the performance of the manufacturing value stream, not just an individual or group of resources in isolation."

“Downtime isn’t just a maintenance issue any more,” observes David Blanchard, editor-in-chief of IndustryWeek. “It’s important to get every department involved in focusing on, and ultimately solving, the root causes of downtime.”

The white paper goes on to propose an alternate approach – throughput analysis – as a more modern and effective method for acquiring objective data about the causes of plant inefficiency. It explains why focusing on optimizing throughput facilitates more-informed decision making and provides greater positive impact to the bottom line of your enterprise.

“The disadvantage of relying on traditional manufacturing reports such as downtime lists is that you don’t see the whole picture,” said Richard Aston, Ricoh, UK. “Throughput analysis has helped us understand what is happening on the plant floor, how different processes affect each other and exactly where we should focus our efforts to see the greatest improvement in our plant performance.”

“The critical machine or process is the one that, when it goes down, products do not go out the back door,” commented Gary Mintchell, editor-in-chief of Automation World. “Sometimes when a machine is down, it doesn’t affect the output of finished products. Dennis Cocco and his team at Activplant have devised a tool for finding the critical constraint. That tool is clearly explained in a new white paper entitled: Solving the Downtime Dilemma."

Download Activplant’s Performance Management Software white paper today from the Activplant website. Activplant held a live webinar on this topic on June 11th, 2008. See http://www.activplant.com to find this and other archived web events.

About Activplant
An enterprise manufacturing intelligence market leader, Activplant’s Performance Management System has set the standard in operational excellence within the world’s largest and most admired manufacturers. Aimed at high-volume, high-automation plants, Activplant’s solution consolidates plant floor data into relevant real-time and historical information, enabling productivity gains by optimizing product, people, equipment and processes. With Activplant solutions, plant managers and manufacturing executives can focus on the key issues in their facilities that ultimately improve product quality, accelerate new product launches and drive performance gains. Activplant is a privately held company based in London, Ontario. For more information please visit www.activplant.com.

For more information, contact:
Kathryn Clark
Activplant Corporation
(519) 668-7336 ex. 378
kclark@activplant.com