Introduction to Digital Performance Management (DPM)
Written by: Tori Firewind, IoT EDC
“Digital Performance Management (DPM) is a closed-loop, problem solving solution that helps manufacturers identify, prioritize, and solve their biggest loss challenges, resulting in reduced cost, increased revenue, and improved service levels.”
What is DPM?
Digital Performance Manager (DPM) is an application which improves factory efficiency across a variety of different areas, namely “the four P’s” of Digital Transformation: products, processes, places, and people. Each performance issue in a factory can be mapped to at least one of these improvement categories in a new strategy for Continuous Improvement (CI) founded by PTC.
11 Closing the Loop Across Products, Processes, People, and Places, Manufacturing Leadership Journal
At PTC, CI in factories is driven by a “best practice” approach, with years of experience in manufacturing solutions combining with the collective knowledge of the many diverse use cases PTC has encountered, to generate a focused, prescriptive path for improvement in any individual factory.
PTC is also defining new industry standards for OEE analysis by using time as a currency within DPM. This standardization technique improves intuitive impact assessment and allows for direct comparison of metrics (see the Help Center for details on how each metric is calculated).
DPM creates a closed loop for CI, from the monitoring phase performed both automatically and through manual operator input, to the prioritization and analyzation phases performed by plant managers. DPM helps plant managers by tracking metrics of factory performance that often go overlooked by other systems. With Analytics, DPM can also do much of the analysis automatically, finding the root causes much more rapidly.
Production supervisors who manage the entire production line then know which less-than-effective components on the line need help. They can quickly design and redesign solutions for specific production issues. Task management within DPM helps both the production manager and the maintenance engineer to complete the improvement process. Using other PTC tools like Creo and Vuforia make the path to improvement even faster and easier, requiring less expert knowledge from the front-line workers and empowering every level of participation in the digital transformation process to make a direct, measurable impact on physical production.
How Does DPM Work?
DPM makes use of an external SQL Server to run queries against collected data and perform aggregation and analysis tasks in the background, on a separate server location than the thing model and ingestion database. This ensures that use cases involving real-time alerts and events, high-capacity ingestion, or others are still possible on the ThingWorx Foundation server.
The IoT EDC is focusing in on DPM alone for a series of technical briefs which provide insight and expert level recommendations regarding DPM usage and configuration. Stay tuned into the PTC Community for more updates to come.
