SAS, GE Fanuc Offer Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence

SAS Institute, a market leader in e-intelligence and data warehousing, announced a marketing agreement with CimWorks, a GE Fanuc company, that blends the plant floor control and data acquisition expertise of GE Fanuc with the data quality, analysis and reporting expertise of SAS.

Specifically, the SAS and CimWorks solution will provide a packaged analysis-ready data model and warehouse load process.

Gary Driskill, senior quality assurance engineer at Lockheed Martin has been testing the solution. "The solution offered by SAS and CimWorks provides the infrastructure for defining, monitoring, improving and ultimately managing process performance," he says. "It links the data on our manufacturing floor with all relevant business information data, and offers a knowledge discovery of our manufacturing processes."

"We're excited about teaming with GE Fanuc in an effort to integrate the plant floor, and provide an 'enterprise quality' view of manufacturing for operations and engineering management," said Jim Davis, SAS vice president of worldwide marketing. "The SAS and CimWorks solution will consist of the GE Fanuc CimWorks VisualSPC product line on the shop floor coupled with a Web-based quality reporting system from SAS. "This combined solution will provide a shop floor system that can grow with the changing needs of control and quality engineers," Davis added. "It is a major step in delivering enterprise manufacturing intelligence."

"This is a major step towards digitizing and integrating the plant floor, because both GE Fanuc and SAS are customer and industry-focused," said Lorrie Norrington, president and CEO of GE Fanuc. "We will start with the quality tool suite. The integration of SAS and VisualSPC will allow specialized graphics to be delivered from the shop floor by SAS through the VisualSPC interface. In the future we hope to provide data integration of the factory floor, operations level and enterprise management."

About Visual SPC

Visual SPC is a family of data collection software and hardware built from the factory floor up to reflect how manufacturing companies work. This Windows-based software incorporates extensive capabilities that provide the flexibility and control needed for data collection, analysis and reporting. The Zipper hand-held SPC data collector weighs less than a pound and is designed to meet the unique, portable data collection requirements of manufacturing quality assurance departments.

About CimWorks/GE Fanuc

GE Fanuc Automation is a leading global supplier of industrial control systems and is a joint venture between GE and FANUC, Ltd of Japan. Headquartered in Charlottesville, Va., GE Fanuc is part of GE Industrial Systems, a $6 billion global leader in manufacturing products used to distribute, protect, and control electrical power and equipment, and supplying product and service solutions for commercial, industrial, residential and utility applications. For more information visit www.gefanuc.com.

About SAS

SAS is a world leader in e-intelligence software and services, enabling its customers to turn raw data - including the vast quantity generated by e-business - into usable knowledge. Software from SAS, one of the world's largest privately held software companies, is used at more than 35,000 business, government and university sites in 110 countries. For more information visit www.sas.com.

Contact SAS Institute, Wally Maczka, 919-531-5350, Wally.Maczka@sas.com.