Caterpillar Inc and StatSoft Inc (www.statsoft.com), have announced the general release of PROCEED, a turnkey software solution designed for manufacturing companies for the modelling, optimisation and simulation of their complex manufacturing processes.
The official public showcase of the PROCEED software will be held at the American Society for Quality's World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Seattle, Washington from 16 to 18 May 2005.
The PROCEED software is based on the integration of Caterpillar's patent-pending analytic processes powered by the industry-leading suite of STATISTICA enterprise analytics software. Caterpillar's cutting-edge analytic processes are used to effectively simulate, predict and optimise the outcome of complex manufacturing processes.
"Caterpillar is recognised worldwide for design and manufacturing of machines and engines. What is not so widely known is the tremendous amount of technology coming from our research and development team that makes those industry-leading products a reality," commented Mark Pflederer, Chief Technology Officer and Vice-President of Caterpillar's Technology & Solutions Division.
"The alliance with StatSoft is an example of adding value to Caterpillar's research accomplishments by commercialising selected technologies for potential use in other industries."
StatSoft deployed Caterpillar's patented approach in its STATISTICA Enterprise analytics platform and will market and support the PROCEED software.
"This collaboration will combine and leverage the world-class know-how of Caterpillar for creating and implementing efficient and high-quality solutions for manufacturing and logistics, with StatSoft's cutting-edge, open architecture STATISTICA enterprise software technologies and predictive analytics," says Dr Thomas Hill, Vice-President of Product Development at StatSoft.
PROCEED
The PROCEED software combines novel and traditional knowledge extraction methods to help manufacturers:
* Derive and validate simple to complex causal relationships between manufacturing processes and product quality outcomes.
* Deploy actionable information to allow process owners and knowledge workers to compare what-if scenarios and simultaneously optimise multiple competing outcomes.
PROCEED is well-suited in the following scenarios:
* Complex manufacturing processes that involve many steps: Finding a defect in process is much more valuable than finding that same defect in finished product testing or in costly warranty claims. PROCEED empowers knowledge workers to determine the most important process parameters to monitor and the distributions of acceptable values driving optimal product outcomes.
* Difficult manufacturing process modelling problems. PROCEED succeeds in modelling the relationships between manufacturing process parameters and outcomes even when there are sparse data, with many more parameters measured in the production process that there are observed cases. PROCEED succeeds in modelling even the most complex relationships.
* Products with competing customer requirements. Manufacturers of complex products often have to balance multiple, competing requirements, including customer requirements, regulatory requirements and internal constraints. PROCEED provides an interactive software environment to optimise the production process to achieve the best results along multiple outcomes.
* Design of Experiments (DOE) is not practical or feasible. Due to increases in availability and features of data collection and storage systems, most organisations are sitting on a wealth of historical data. PROCEED allows organisations to capitalise on this information and translate it into actions to improve processes and optimise outcomes. In many cases, utilising historical data is the preferred method where DOEs are too expensive, too time-consuming or not possible.
PROCEED includes the Actionable Decision Environment, a set of graphical tools to allow users to interact with the process models. PROCEED provides an efficient mechanism for users to manipulate what if scenarios and see the predicted outcomes in an easy-to-understand graphical display.
For more information about PROCEED and the PROCEED events at the ASQ World Conference on Quality, please visit http://PROCEED.statsoft.com.
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For more than 80 years, Caterpillar Inc has been building the world's infrastructure and, in partnership with its worldwide dealer network, is driving positive and sustainable change in every continent. With 2004 sales and revenues of $30.25 billion, Caterpillar is a technology leader and the world's leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, clean diesel and natural gas engines and industrial gas turbines. More information is available at www.cat.com.
StatSoft, Inc
StatSoft, Inc (www.statsoft.com), founded in 1984, is now one of the largest producers of enterprise and desktop software for data analysis, data mining, quality control/Six Sigma and Web-based analytics. Its products are used worldwide at most major universities, corporations and government agencies and are distributed and supported with training and consulting services by a worldwide network of StatSoft subsidiaries on all continents and a large number of authorised distributors.
STATISTICA has received the highest rating in EVERY comparative review in which it has been featured since its first release in 1993.
About the PROCEED Public Release at the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement Caterpillar Inc and StatSoft will host the formal public release of PROCEED at the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Seattle, WA from 16 to 18 May 2005. For the schedule of PROCEED-related events, please see http://PROCEED.statsoft.com.