For years, the traditional focus of manufacturing has been to develop products and streamline processes—to optimize resources and minimize waste. To meet today's challenges, manufacturing companies need a single, integrated vantage point that spans the entire manufacturing process, from inputs to outputs - ideally, even upstream to suppliers and downstream to financial and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Manufacturers face unrelenting competitive pressures, which make it increasingly important for them to understand profitability and costing of individual product and to leverage the insights gleaned from every customer interaction. To sharpen their competitive edge, iCAST provides a unique modeled framework for manufacturers that continuously collect and analyze business critical operational data that extends from the shop floor to the top floor.

The goal is to ensure greater visibility for manufacturing industry and see how financial, plant floor, customer service, and marketing performance meet business objectives - such as increased sales and customer retention. While reengineering factory floor has significantly improved all areas of processing for manufacturing companies, it has also created a staggering amount of data. Manufacturing organizations collect data throughout the production process; Information on raw materials, equipment parameter settings, operational performance, and test results, quality characteristics of outgoing product, and much more. The disparity and disconnection of these information systems poses a major problem for achieving corporate-wide quality and productivity gains.

iCAST Manufacturing Intelligence Platform (MIP) helps the industry to analyze huge volumes of data hidden in operational databases , legacy systems and other custom information sources. It uncovers significant patterns in that data, trace the source of problems, and yield actionable intelligence quickly to make astute decisions. Built on an integrated data warehouse, iCAST Analytical Studio enables meaningful comparisons between plants, production lines, and products. The Manufacturing Intelligence box in iCAST provides predefined layouts specific to different production departments. Reporting layouts enables on demand compliance to multiple jurisdictions and to multiple standards. This includes a rich set of analytical functions and generates automatic reporting and trustworthy validations. Business processes are stored and displayed in ‘iCAST Process Box’, making it easy for floor engineers and managers to instantly customizes, and define new workflows, and processes. Business processes and rules will become major corporate assets and competitive advantage in future as they streamline the data access, analysis and delivery of enterprise information.

ICAST Intelligence Platform is an ideal fit Manufacturing Intelligence as it empowers the enterprise with the key cornerstones of iCAST - interoperability, scalability, flexibility and usability