XHQ - Improving enterprise performance through operations intelligence solutions

The XHQ operations intelligence platform aggregates, relates and presents operational and business data in real time to improve enterprise performance. Through XHQ, users have a single coherent view of information enabling a variety of solutions in real-time performance management and decision support.

The Challenge
Operations personnel throughout all levels of a manufacturing organization typically struggle to pull together a complete, timely picture of a situation. Like missing pieces of a puzzle, critical information is often scattered throughout a variety of databases, enterprise applications and operational systems in a wide range of formats with a confusing mix of unrelated contexts. If this information ever does come together in a meaningful way, it is often in a periodic report that is produced long after the opportunity to react to the information has passed.

The Benefits
Through XHQ, operations intelligence solutions can be built that deliver real-time, actionable views. XHQ solutions put these views into the hands of operations personnel, thereby engaging operations in decisions that impact the business. Although, the specific application areas and benefits realized from such solutions vary from customer to customer, examples of specific benefits have been documented. One example of specific benefits can be found in a customer that implemented XHQ operations intelligence as the platform for a reliability focused maintenance / reliability focus operations program at a refining facility. This customer recognized immediate results which were documented and quantified by a third party in an extensive ROI study. This study credited XHQ with the following impacts on overall plant performance:

Business Indicator

Multi-Year Average

Reduction in Operating Expenses

8%

Increase in High-Value Product Production

10.5%

This resulted in a calculated Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 339% in realized business value (Corporate taxes not included in IRR). Additional potential benefits identified provide an additional 150% to 200% IRR.

Our Solution
XHQ extracts data from a variety of information sources - ERP, data warehouse, production databases, document management systems, process historians or manufacturing automation including the SIMATIC IT Framework environment - with equal facility.

Through the XHQ component-based data model, this data is aggregated and related to produce information that is framed within a meaningful business context. Real-time views from the XHQ data model are streamed live over the internet/intranet to zero administration, browser clients, mobile devices and Enterprise Portals. This information is personalized for the role of the individual to provide views that combine information to address specific issues of users. The entire environment is maintained through an integrated configuration environment that enables non-technical business domain experts to create content without programming or extensive IT support.

Finally, the entire system is architected for scalability. Using the XHQ real-time data cache, hundreds of users can be served with live, streaming data without over-burdening the network or the back-end operational systems.