Business performance management and programmes for lean and improved product innovation are among a handful of prescriptive measures being applied by manufacturers to achieve competitiveness. In the case of Dallas-based Celanese Corp, an industrial chemical company, this is a global effort. Brenda Hightower, manufacturing business systems manager for Celanese, sees value in delivering real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) to managers. Celanese (an industrial chemical company with about 9500 employees) had 2003 revenues of $4.6 billion. ‘The translation of operational parameters into financial parameters makes work more meaningful’, says Hightower. ‘But we only deliver actionable information 3 in other words, those few KPIs whose results a given individual can influence through good decision-making. Our portal solution, Lighthammer’s Illuminator, was rolled out to more than 20 sites worldwide 3 including nine sites in 2004, and the others in 2005 and 2006.’ Sudipta Bhattacharya, VP of manufacturing applications for enterprise vendor SAP, said, ‘People need to understand that what we’re talking about is access to events on the plant floor as they unfold, not control of the plant floor.’ Bhattacharya spearheaded SAP’s efforts aimed at increasing relevancy on plant floors, including its support of the S95 integration standard, which defined interfaces between applications at the industrial control level, and applications at the manufacturing execution system level. Celanese is an SAP user, and SAP has a partnership with Lighthammer, so the integration accomplished was already ‘internal’ to Illuminator, says Russ Fadel, CEO, Lighthammer. He said Celanese’s approach to the project includes going horizontal across sites, and then ‘burrowing down’ as the company becomes proficient at identifying applications that can be launched on the Illuminator platform 3 another dynamic being seen repeatedly in manufacturing environments, regardless of the platform. At most of the Celanese sites, the project also included integration with OSIsoft’s plant data historian, which was core to the vendor’s RtPM (real-time performance management) platform. Hightower said Celanese developed templates for similar plants, and was replicating an identical process at each plant as the roll-out proceeds. This horizontal approach brought a quick accumulation of benefits, as well as eventual comparisons of similar plants’ performance