Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB 
Starting Situation
The databases of production-related IT systems hold the key to future corporate success. If operational data such as malfunctions, downtimes, quantities or cycle information from manufacturing and assembly processes are processed in a meaningful way, they offer a variety of ways for improving operational structures and designing production efficiently.
In companies with many sites or organizationally independent business units, however, the data archived by the respective control systems is only accessible to a few people. In addition, the systematic search for data that is actually helpful for a task is made more difficult by the size of the data archives. The data volumes result from many individual reports from production plants and their storage over the product life cycle.
Operators in production and management need high-quality information at the push of a button, condensed as far as possible into meaningful key figures.
Requirements
Due to the enormous amounts of data, the technical requirements for a company-wide evaluation system with corresponding "Manufacturing Intelligence" logics are accordingly high.
For the input of the control systems, for example, large amounts of data must be recorded in milliseconds. The generation and output of evaluation tables or diagrams to hundreds of users at the same time also requires a system designed for maximum performance.
It must also be ensured that the system can be adapted to the customer's needs and that access to the system can be configured individually for each user, from management to employee. The customer's terminology must be transferable to the system so that users can find the terms they are familiar with.
This ensures that you can work with the program quickly and without a long training period.
The Solution: ProVis.Paula®
A successfully realized plant information system of Fraunhofer IOSB is the evaluation system ProVis.Paula®, which is strictly based on web technologies.
The Fraunhofer IOSB product WebGenesis® is used as the basis and development platform for ProVis.Paula®. This has the advantage that existing components can be reused and the system can also be used as an in-house information system.
In the daily operations of an international automobile manufacturer, more than 1,560 users access the Manufacturing Intelligence server via Internet-enabled PCs. The connection is made via standard interfaces; the software is implemented entirely in Java, so that the customer is free to choose the operating system and database.