Design and Information Systems

Rochester Institute of Technology  Saunders College of Business

TO: Dr.Bryan Reinicke, Professor of Design and Information Systems

FROM: Xuanli Xiong, RIT Student

DATE: March 7, 2021

SUBJECT: The Dow Chemical Company: A Pilot for Enterprise Manufacturing

Intelligence

Birth: Expansion of LIM system - Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence

The chemical industry is an industry of constant innovation where process changes will be
directly linked to yield, and it is especially important to accurately diagnose and correct errors in
the process, and these diagnoses and changes are inextricably linked to inspection data. The
existing chemical industry mainly chooses to collect measurement data through sensors on the
equipment, which is time-consuming and expensive to test regularly due to the variability of the
equipment. The inoperability in the acquired data increased the difficulty of directly
transforming the data into existing value, and the repeated manipulation of the data reduced the
real-time value of the data. In the early 20th century, intelligent data analysis models with high
volume and high-speed processing became popular in the chemical industry, and the birth of new
technologies strengthened companies to contextualize data with production internal and external
business environments. For these reasons, itself as a product innovation and endpoint research
and development of Dow in order to make chemical products more process customization, rather
than ordinary mass production inventory, taking full advantage of the advantages of high-speed
processing of big data chose to pilot a real-time data acquisition system, and on this basis turned
to more refined real-time data monitoring, visual analysis of enterprise software development for
plant engineers to monitor and take action in real time .

Applications: Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence

Dow's chemical products are largely generated around the engineers' design processes, so as the
subject of the product, how the engineers understand and communicate the data is more
Design and Information Systems
Rochester Institute of Technology  Saunders College of Business

important than automatically transmitting it. The approach taken in the early days was to upload
large tables of data for analysis by the statistics department, on the basis of which
troubleshooting was performed. The problems that arose from this approach were that it was
time-consuming, error-prone and unpredictable. EMI test applications on the contrary, the
system will be the main data management tasks to engineers, EMI can be centralized through
algorithms to process a large number of data generated in production, followed by a dashboard to
show the results of the analysis, directly provide new product insights to engineers, so that
engineers from different cultural backgrounds can have a unified judgment and conclusions on
the same data. the benefits of EMI intervention in production are better the benefit of EMI's
involvement in production is that the raw production data is better monitored from the engineers
themselves, and the data is actively put into design and development rather than being passively
analyzed as a result.

The Future: Measuring Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence

EMI is something completely new to engineers who do not have the ability to analyze data. For
this reason, the R&D team had to make sure that EMI was divisible into different categories and
that different modules were added or removed according to the characteristics of the factory line,
thus adapting to the production characteristics of the engineers. In addition to this, it had to be
easy to install and operate, and to extract a large number of visual analysis reports directly from
the requirements. The new system on line also means that management needs to his cost
accounting and performance accounting, I believe that companies need to establish their own
cost performance accounting system, in the initial operation of the system to take two parallel
lines, the original way and the existing EMI operation of the cost point and performance of the
comparison, so as to complement the strengths and weaknesses. In addition, engineers for EMI
system understanding are also particularly important, companies need to regularly train engineers
on the system, so that they better understand the new system on the need for data management;
performance award system can mobilize the production plant engineers for the use of the new
system of enthusiasm. Companies can also regularly launch message boards to let engineers
share their feelings about using the new system and provide the R&D team with new suggestions
for updates to improve the sense of use and interaction of the system.