Downloads, White Papers

Protecting Plant Systems: Application Support
by Vince O'Rourke, EnteGreat

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Paper Overview
Manufacturing plants are more dependent than ever on IT systems that support operations.  Consequently, the operational integrity of plant systems is paramount. Manufacturing plants face a wide assortment of potential problems concerning networks, data integrity, systems infrastructure, applications, and application support. At any moment, a failure could occur; servers or databases could crash, a network can fail, or an operator work station could break. Any of these could cause an operating disruption and temporary or permanent data loss. The consequences can range from minor annoyances to major crises.  If a network fails or a server crashes, and critical applications cannot function, the entire plant's ability to continue production may be shut down for hours or longer.

In some industries, product cannot be shipped if production information or regulatory data is missing or is not available in a timely fashion. Loss or corruption of regulatory data may mean that perfectly good finished products may have to be scrapped. If good, solid support programs are not implemented, the mechanisms for responding to and preventing problems may be woefully inadequate. Fortunately, there are ways to address these problems and significantly reduce these risks. 

Protecting The Plant is a six-part series of white papers that addresses the broad and disparate nature of the challenges affecting plant systems. The sixth and final paper in this series addresses the challenges of providing application support in the plant.

Paper Outline

• Introduction
• The Challenges of Providing Application Support in the Plant
• Components of a Successful Application Support Program
• Continuous Improvement and Change Management
• Conclusion

About the Author
Vince O'Rourke has over 35 years of experience in Food manufacturing. Prior to joining EnteGreat, Vince spent 25 years with Kraft Foods in various assignments including: Corporate Audit, Systems Development, Plant Systems Management, Division Systems Manager (Maxwell House), and was most recently Director of Manufacturing Systems for North America.

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