Introduction to Enterprise Gateway™ (EG)

Enterprise Gateway™, referred as EG, is a middleware component that integrates a Manufacturing Intelligence product VisualPlant? to any ERP system.

EG is a distributed, open, collaborative, VisualPlant?-to-Enterprise application integration system in .NET platform for:

Bi-directional Operational Visibility; Reciprocal and timely feed of critical information to the Enterprise; Automated Triggering of business processes. EG along with Visual Plant together enable companies to realize optimal management of their assets without the need for over-management or risking under-management.

Some of the features of EG include, the ability to proactively monitor and prevent critical plant faults and failures, automatically report such imminent failures to the enterprise, generate and manage work-orders in a timely manner, track rejects on shop floor to suppliers, monitor machine health, etc. EG can also be configured to alert and report to enterprise users on asset utilization, OEE and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - such notification to executives occur in real time by email, mobile, etc.

1.2. Business Objective of EG

The following are the General High Level Business Objectives of EG: 1. To provide real time manufacturing intelligence information to the Enterprise User from the Plant Floor.

2. To deliver filtered and relevant information to the Enterprise User when the user requests for it, in the

requested format.

3. To prevent duplication of data entry by operators in the plant - once in the plant information system

application and once in the enterprise application.

4. To configure each interface as an independent channel – ability to configure more than one channel at a time

for different enterprise applications or different user groups.

5. To allow for bi-directional connectivity between an Enterprise Application and Visual Plant - provision to

upload information like production plans, schedules, etc., to VP via EG from an Enterprise Application and provision to download status reports, fault notifications, etc., to the Enterprise side.

6. To effect Business Process Automation inside the enterprise based on triggers from the plant side.

7. To provide for creating "data pathways" from one EG OBJECT to another by means of a configuration tool and

thereby create relationships between EG OBJECTS.

8. To provide aggregations that are Enterprise specific and activity based to accommodate for the costing and

accounting needs of the enterprise.

9. To provide the user a rule builder tool, using which, users can define their own filtering conditions, or plant

monitoring metrics.

10. To provide exposure to the user, of events that are either occurring in the plant (end of shift, end of order,

tool change, etc.) or inside the EG (the arrival of an inbound transaction from SAP, trigger of a timer, counter, etc.), so that, the user may schedule actions based on such event triggers.