Collaborative Manufacturing software products have emerged to help companies
develop and deploy operational excellence applications. In order to remain
competitive in a global economy with excess manufacturing capacity, companies
must improve all aspects of their operational execution. Until recently the
release of Lighthammer’s Collaborative Manufacturing Suite, Collaborative
Manufacturing has been merely a vision evangelized by leading industry analysts.
The requirements of this space can be broadly defined as: 1. Unified visibility
to all systems that impact manufacturing operations 2. Enterprise-wide
Performance-based Operations 3. Operational processes embodied in systems 4.
Synchronization between plant and enterprise systems The first applications
available to help solve these problems were Manufacturing Intelligence solutions
focused on providing enterprise-wide visibility to manufacturing performance (1
& 2 above). Lighthammer’s Illuminator, Manufacturing Intelligence Server , is
the recognized pioneer and leader in this space, in use at hundreds of companies
worldwide. While Manufacturing Intelligence can deliver significant benefits in
the areas of performance measurement and analysis, it delivers only a portion of
the promise of a complete Collaborative Manufacturing infrastructure.
Manufacturing Intelligence applications lack the Collaborative Execution engine
required to capture operational processes that improve excellence and embody
them within systems. Additionally, they lack the ability to provide the range of
services necessary to synchronize data and processes between plant and ERP
systems. With the release of Xacute, Lighthammer’s revolutionary Collaborative
Execution engine, the worlds first Collaborative Manufacturing Suite has been
born. Succinctly defined, Collaborative Manufacturing software is the
convergence of Manufacturing Intelligence and Collaborative Execution. The
result is a Collaborative Manufacturing product that speeds the development and
deployment of enterprise-wide operational excellence applications that leverage
not replace existing system investments.