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This regroups production management with the objective of rationalising the fabrication processes, making good use of the experience and knowledge aquired to the benefit of product development. There are two distinct “intelligences” in industrial management:

  Business Intelligence
  Manufacturing Intelligence

The first concerns the management process, whereas the second concerns the fabrication process.
The common denominator is the link between the performance and the deviances observed during the actual carrying out of these processes, and the decision-making, depending on 2 axes:
  in real time: the anomalies are directly treated by the operators (the forman or the control system: mainly for the manufacturing process) during the carrying out of the process.
  In deferred time: by retroaction concerning process conception, which will be amended by the person responsible (RnD mainly for the manufacturing process) to take the differences observed into account in relation to performance targets and the information acquired on the premises.

The global mission of Business/Manufacturing Intelligence in logic 6 Sigma for example, can be resumed as follows:
  processing the information to measure the performance and to detect the differences in the aforementioned processes.
  Improving and compensating, in real time or deferred.

A very important point concerns the exploitation of raw data coming directly from the operation of the process, to create useful and reliable information, to correctly evaluate performance, to understand the origins of the problems and to enable the taking of appropriate decisions.If the concept is new, the tools have been in existance for a long time:

  Manufacturing Intelligence OEE (resource vision)
  Manufacturing Intelligence SPC / SQC Knowledge Plan (product vision )
  Manufacturing Intelligence advanced control (Resource and Product)
  Manufacturing Intelligence Modélisation tools and process optimization

It is therefore a philosophy of process management in which the product life cycle does not follow a linear progression: Specification - Conception - Qualification - Product life cycle by process execution, but rather a permanent loop from execution to conception.
Improving processes is simply a duty for companies, and the concept of Manufacturing Intelligence, which revitalises the product development life cycle, has but one constraint: controlling risk, a condition of success.