Application Performance Management on the Factory Floor

Today's typical factory depends on technology to keep the factory floor moving at peak productivity. What happens if the technology fails? It can cost millions of dollars. Averting a factory floor shutdown does more than keep customers happy. It prevents catastrophic impact on a company's bottom line.

Application performance management can save millions.

In the typical factory, there can be many automated factory floor systems. These systems need to be monitored and managed end-to-end in real time so any failure is caught early before it cascades into a complete system's failure. This is a lesson one of the largest technology producers in the U.S. learned a few years ago.

This business handled a very high volume production schedule. The main factory facility built four complete systems every minute, 24 hours a day. Each system retailed at an average of $10,000. So if production stopped, $40,000 worth of revenue was lost for every minute the factory was offline.

This is exactly what happened one morning. One of the servers crashed, but without an application performance management tool monitoring the system, the crash went undetected. This caused messages from the main production application to back-up. Finally, the messages exceeded the application's capacity and the entire system shut down. It took the factory's IT staff three hours to find and fix the problem. That three hours cost the company $7 million.

How had this happened? The factory didn't have application performance monitoring and business transaction management software installed to ensure that their automated systems were functioning normally. Thus no one was alerted to the fact that a cascading failure was developing. Not only was the problem discovered only after it had shut the factory down, the IT staff didn't have the tools to quickly identify the source of the problem.

The company turned to Nastel Technologies for a solution. Nastel implemented its AutoPilot suite of application performance monitoring and business transaction management software to monitor the operation of the company's automated factory floor systems. In a matter of days, every key manufacturing automation application was monitored by AutoPilot's complex event processing (CEP) engine. Every infrastructure system that supported the automation applications was also monitored.

Each server within the IT infrastructure was now under constant monitoring. From one consolidated dashboard, the factory IT staff could identify every server, and any point of failure along the critical paths in their manufacturing process control systems. AutoPilot enabled IT to quickly establish policies and business rules that AutoPilot could then apply automatically to all the transactions being processed through the complex event processing (CEP) engine.