Posts tagged ‘GE Fanuc’
Proficy DataMart 2.0 Extends Enterprise Reporting Capabilities
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms announced the availability of Proficy® DataMart Version 2.0, an enterprise-reporting platform for all the manufacturing intelligence within Proficy Plant Applications. The new version expands the ad-hoc reporting capabilities of the suite both at the plant and enterprise levels.
The Proficy DataMart solution provides critical production-centric information to the knowledge users in the plants and the enterprise. It enables users to serve themselves to the real-time production data Proficy Plant Applications has converted into meaningful intelligence. Its high performance KPI roll-ups and drill-downs integrate data across multiple machines, lines and sites seamlessly. You can utilize DataMart with existing Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse solutions to manage the performance of production operations.
“Plant Applications has been the flagship of the Proficy Operations Management suite since its acquisition more than eight years ago,” said Sheila Kester, General Manager, Operations Management Software, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms. “Our focus has been to continually make this product evolve in ways to make it easier to deploy, provide even faster time to value, and to extend its capabilities to solve more problems for more Proficy customers.”
Throughout 2009, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms has announced many enhancements, extensions and complementary solutions that extend the capabilities and value of the Proficy Plant Applications family. These include:
- Proficy Scheduler – Extends the Proficy Plant Applications family into the Finite Capacity Scheduling (FCS) arena for materials and orders optimization;
- Proficy Maintenance Gateway 2.0 – Integrates the family with the user’s maintenance systems, ensuring that Maintenance and Operations are coordinated in their efforts;
- Proficy Plant Applications Dynamos for Proficy iFIX – Puts the knowledge and information of Proficy Plant Applications at the fingertips of production operators;
- Enhanced Crew Scheduling capabilities;
- An updated Software Development Kit; and
- Packaged Proficy SmartStart solutions – Combine the software package with Implementation Services to improve a user’s time-to-value when implementing a new system.
In addition, a slate of additional enhancements scheduled will be introduced over the next several months, including new web deployment capability, updated Proficy Workflow Service Provider (SP) integration, enhanced Enterprise Portal/Collaboration integration, and the next generation Enterprise Integration solution from Proficy – Proficy Open Enterprise.
“The extended and enhanced capabilities of the Proficy Plant Applications family provide additional avenues for operational excellence initiatives to companies that have implemented the core solution,” said Kester. “For new and existing customers alike, Proficy Plant Applications’ Open-and-Layered architecture, modular and scalable applications, and ability to span the spectrum of production typologies, make it more capable than ever for solving more problems for more users in more of their strategic and tactical operations.”
GE Fanuc Announces Proficy CIMPLICITY GlobalView
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms announced the availability of Proficy® CIMPLICITY GlobalView, a highly scalable application that delivers the power of CIMPLICITY to remote clients enabling real-time monitoring, data analysis and plant floor control from within a Web browser.
“Companies need access to real-time information about their operations at all levels of the organization,” said Claire Cerrato, General Manager of GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ Automation Software group. “Companies are increasing their mobile workforces and require highly scalable, non-compromising products to keep them connected. CIMPLICITY GlobalView enables full viewing and control of plant operations and expands the native integration of CIMPLICITY with GE Fanuc’s other Proficy software, providing additional solution possibilities.”
GlobalView provides a full-featured HMI/SCADA client delivered over the Web so operators, engineers and managers can view, react and operate from wherever they are. This enables efficient response to situations avoiding significant downtime, lost batches or catastrophic events. It also transforms the way teams work and collaborate, because with GlobalView multiple users can connect easily to the same system to analyze the situation and make quick, fact-based decisions. Users also don’t have to compromise functionality or re-write current applications in order to get accessibility. Ease of installation makes this a quick add-on for existing and new systems.
GlobalView extends GE Fanuc’s existing footprint in HMI/SCADA to knowledge workers not on or directly tied to the plant floor. GlobalView also introduced the Relay Server, which makes deploying HMI/SCADA on a massive scale possible. With a Relay Server deployed in the GlobalView architecture and multiple GlobalView servers underneath, customers have the ability to globalize their applications and support hundreds of simultaneous users with the only limitation being server hardware. The new software capability opens new doors to innovative, Web-only, CIMPLICITY-based applications providing the ability to connect to previous versions of CIMPLICITY without any additional development.
The product has been developed on top of CIMPLICITY, so it complies with GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ open and layered strategy and enables the Web user to harness the proven power of CIMPLICITY anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
“This product is a big step forward in the accessibility of real-time data to a large amount of users,” continued Cerrato. “GlobalView validates GE Fanuc’s commitment to providing innovative and scalable solutions to solve customer needs particularly in this challenging economic climate.”
New Proficy Maintenance Gateway Release Improves Real-Time Operations
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, announced the availability of Proficy® Maintenance Gateway 2.0 to help customers avoid costly equipment failures and reduce asset maintenance costs. The software enhances the company’s Proficy software suite – a platform for driving reliable, profitable operations in a plant and across the enterprise – by ensuring that maintenance operations are integrated into each company’s journey toward operational excellence. The product can scale up from a simple condition monitoring system to a sophisticated orchestration to help maximize asset utilization and reliability.
“The timeliness of this product release in light of today’s global economic climate is important,” said Sheila Kester, Business General Manager, GE Fanuc Operations Management Software. “By keeping the Production and Maintenance departments ‘in synch,’ an organization eliminates the costly delays in responding to the plant’s evolving operational dynamics. Furthermore, the continuity and accuracy in the information flow between production and maintenance teams allows the organization to take proactive steps to eliminate hidden costs before they’re incurred.”
The new release extends the proven capabilities of Proficy Maintenance Gateway by providing a new automatic measurement point update module, enhanced write-back functions from the enterprise to the plant systems, and new adaptors to Enterprise Asset Maintenance (EAM) applications, such as SAP’s PM module and newer versions of MAXIMO®. The broad range of connectivity options, ease of use by plant personnel, and ability to incrementally scale from small to large installations make the solution desirable to companies in asset-intensive industries.
“Proficy Maintenance Gateway acts as an integration engine of the Production and Maintenance processes of an enterprise, continuously driving business-critical efficiencies in both departments in real-time,” said Coleman Easterly, Product General Manager, GE Fanuc Operations Management Software. “This is achieved by leveraging and extracting more from the core capabilities of our Proficy Plant Applications family while doing the same with the EAM systems in an organization.”
Proficy Maintenance Gateway tracks and helps reduce the Mean-Time-To-Repair in “corrective maintenance” cases while working continuously to monitor usage of equipment and automatically ordering “preventive maintenance” orders for improved performance. The product is designed for maintenance and/or production personnel. Out-of-the-box EAM connectors accelerate deployments and reduce installation time to days rather than weeks or months. Also, the enhanced rules engine offers more flexibility for time-based meters and status updates of Work Orders to the control system.
“Proficy Maintenance Gateway enables an organization’s existing asset management system to drive the right set of maintenance strategies for their equipment in a timely manner,” continued Easterly. “It takes into consideration the current, real-time dynamics of the plant equipment and production, rather than being solely based on a set of pre-planned conditions and assumptions. This real-time synchronization between production and maintenance can dramatically reduce unplanned and hidden costs in the short term, while continuously driving improvement in plant reliability in the long run.”
GE Fanuc Launches Advanced Analytics Software for Facilities
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, announced advanced analytics solutions for its software portfolio that are designed to maximize the information that already exists in production operations, extract knowledge from that information and identify the opportunities to solve potential production issues before they impact the process. The introductions of Proficy® Troubleshooter and Proficy Cause+, the updated release of Proficy Historian version 3.5, and the market leadership position of Proficy’s HMI/SCADA products combine to provide companies with unprecedented intelligence they can use to enhance process performance.
This powerful combination of solutions enables:
- Better understanding of the causes of variation and problems in the process as well as the real-time impact of the process on production assets;
- Learning the relationships between disconnected data, extracting knowledge and building business cases with benefit estimations;
- Preventing unnecessary conventional “alarm bursts” with more intelligent alarms that work in multivariate space, indicating causes of problems and providing corrective actions; and
- Expert knowledge capture for making modeling and expert system technology available to all users.
“Everyone not only needs some method for archiving plant data and a system for supervisory control and data acquisition, but also an effective way of doing rapid process troubleshooting and other continuous improvement initiatives utilizing its real-time plant data,” said John Leppiaho, Product General Manager for GE Fanuc’s Operations Management Software. “GE Fanuc’s Proficy Historian is already proven in industries all over the world for collecting, storing and retrieving mission-critical data. The addition of Proficy Troubleshooter and Proficy Cause+ gives users advanced analytics and control of their processes to drive operational excellence.”
These solutions provide essentially a three-step process for advanced analysis starting with Proficy Historian 3.5, which collects, archives and distributes tremendous volumes of real-time process information at extremely high speeds. Built specifically for production and process data acquisition and presentation, Proficy Historian enables users to leverage increased process visibility for better and faster decisions, increased productivity and reduced costs. Proficy Historian is built to store and retrieve production/process data in the way companies need it. This capability enables better responsiveness by quickly providing the granularity of data needed to analyze and solve intense process applications.
The second component of the advanced analytics process is the new Proficy Troubleshooter product, an off-line, value-add product to Proficy Historian that analyzes process variation. It is used to identify causes for production problems and identify opportunities for preventing them in the future. Proficy Troubleshooter acts as a bridge between Proficy Historian and Proficy HMI/SCADA obtaining relationships between process variables and preparing benefit estimations for real-time deployment.
Proficy Troubleshooter has powerful multivariate modeling and data-mining techniques, but it does not require a background in advanced statistics or modeling. It also provides a clear path to real-time solutions for the user – deploying insights as a real-time intelligent monitoring and advisory solution in Proficy Cause+, with outputs displayed in Proficy HMI/SCADA and Web-based reporting.
The components of Proficy Troubleshooter are:
- Proficy Continuous Wizard – For troubleshooting time-based and/or continuous process data;
- Proficy Discrete & Batch Wizard – For troubleshooting generic index-based, discrete and/or batch process data; and
- Proficy Architect – For data preparation, simulation and solution development.
“In the past, we have had reporting tools that gave us an information baseline,” said Leppiaho. “Now we can apply analytics to that data and do ‘what-if’ scenarios to model the process for a solution more effective in driving real process improvement.”
After Proficy Troubleshooter models the solution, the next logical step is to put the process into production. Proficy Cause+ wires in the real-time data and introduces alarms based on causal relationships within the process. It extracts more value from real-time data, in the form of likely causes of process- or asset-related problems and variation in real time, with pre-configured corrective actions to the operator if alarm conditions are triggered.
Proficy Cause+ is a value-added decision-support solution to the Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX and CIMPLICITY products that also provides reporting on causes over specified periods of time for production management and process engineers. It enables real-time causes of process problems (e.g. bad batches), real-time corrective actions to address process problems, wizard-based and custom development and simulation of a real-time solution before deploying it within Proficy HMI/SCADA, model- and rules-based cause identification, Web-based reporting of causes over user-defined periods, intelligent alarming and capturing of expert knowledge for real-time expert system use.
Proficy Cause+ enables production engineers and process specialists to generate real-time causes for production process deviations. During such real-time Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) deviation, in-depth process knowledge is delivered to an operator to provide specific, actionable message guidance for correction. It is a real-time application by which production process variation is identified and whereby root causes for such variation is visualized. Proficy Cause+ is a value-added component deployed directly in existing HMI SCADA/DCS systems. Proficy Cause+ is therefore mostly used by plant operators.
“Progressive companies are achieving even greater benefits by extracting and applying knowledge from historical and real-time data with advanced analytics,” said Tom Fiske, Senior Analyst, ARC Advisory Group. “Traditionally, the use of advanced analytics required high domain expertise to apply effectively. This is no longer the case. Solutions such as those offered by GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms bring the power of real-time visibility and advanced analytics to the masses.”
GE Fanuc Announces DataViews 9.25 for Visualization
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, announced the latest release of DataViews 9.25, a set of high-quality, graphic visualization development tools for building custom applications. The update includes new features that enhance performance of display updates, support the use of scalable text in input object templates, and allow the setting of background color for Scalable Text objects.
DataViews 9.25 also introduces 64-bit operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Version 5.3. This key feature enables developers to gain further performance from their application by having their DataViews-built components harness the 64-bit instruction set directly without the need for emulation. This is a key element for applications displaying a large amount of data in real time as well as apps requiring high performance. With release 9.25, DataViews now supports SPARC Solaris 10, Intel Solaris x86, and Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 (32- and 64-bit). In addition, Java programmers can now develop their applications using the DataViews Java API for Java 2 v1.6
“With DataViews 9.25 running natively on a 64-bit platform, we’ve increased the ability to harness the next generation of 64-bit chipsets and push applications further,” said Mark Pipher, Product General Manager for HMI/SCADA products, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms. “This version introduces the capability to increase the application complexity and its visualization components, processing visualizations and data much faster when compared to 32-bit.”
DataViews is a dynamic visualization toolkit that allows customers to develop high-quality visualizations within their applications to meet their specific needs. After more than 15 years of ongoing development, the multi-platform support and powerful graphical development editor have been the keys to DataViews’ ongoing success.
“DataViews saves programmers significant development time,” continued Pipher, “and it allows graphical objects to be developed and imported quickly and easily, rather than having to develop them in code. It fits seamlessly in the application being developed and leverages industry standard solutions to save data connectivity development time.”
Sealed Computer Designed for Harsh Environments
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms unveiled the SealTouch-15 rugged flat panel computer with an environmentally sealed enclosure. Unlike competing products, the Ruggedized SealTouch-15 is capable of being installed on a metal arm, rather than being mounted on a panel. Weighing just 28 pounds, it is transportable and capable of being used in multiple locations at temperatures up to50°C (122°F).
The SealTouch-15 features an Intel Celeron M 1.5 GHz processor with 512 MBytes DDRAM, a 40 GByte hard drive and Ethernet capability. The 15-inch, XGA resolution display has a resistive touchscreen as an operator interface. Its NEMA 12 environmentally sealed enclosure with corrosion resistance provides protection against falling dirt and is ideal for use in dusty environments.
“We have a long history of introducing solutions for companies who need to deploy computing capability in the harshest, least hospitable environments,” said Adrian Bernhard, general manager of commercial products and systems at GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms. “The introduction of the SealTouch-15 is a response to specific demand for this level of capability, and broadens our product family to allow us to serve an even wider range of customer requirements.”
The SealTouch-15 supports Windows XP, Windows NT and Windows 2000, and is optionally available with a CompactFlash or solid-state hard drive for additional resistance to shock and vibration.
PetroComputing 