Warehousing manufacturing data: A holistic process warehouse for advanced manufacturing analytics

Abstract

Strong competition in the manufacturing industry makes efficient and effective manufacturing processes a critical success factor. However, existing warehousing and analytics approaches in manufacturing are coined by substantial shortcomings, significantly preventing comprehensive process improvement. Especially, they miss a holistic data base integrating operational and process data, e. g., from Manufacturing Execution and Enterprise Resource Planning systems. To address this challenge, we introduce the Manufacturing Warehouse, a concept for a holistic manufacturing-specific process warehouse as central part of the overall Advanced Manufacturing Analytics Platform. We define a manufacturing process meta model and deduce a universal warehouse model. In addition, we develop a procedure for its instantiation and the integration of concrete source data. Finally, we describe a first proof of concept based on a prototypical implementation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.