Lighthammer adds capabilities to plant visibility solution
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2003 7:00:00 AM
Lighthammer—a fast-growing company with management heritage out of supervisory control success story Wonderware—recently concluded its first user conference announcing Xacute, a new solution that adds workflow capabilities to the company's existing plant management dashboard offering.
With first-half 2003 sales roughly triple those of the same period a year ago, Lighthammer growth has come on the strength of Illuminator, a manufacturing analytics portal that draws data from plant-floor systems ranging from supervisory control to statistical quality, process historians, and others.
Illuminator is one of a wave of new visibility and business intelligence solutions that deliver to those interested in plant operations the kinds of dashboard and scorecarding capabilities popular for the front office.
Having gained a unified window into operations through Illuminator, company President Russ Fadel says his customers wanted a way to configure new business processes based on the aggregated information. Combining report preparation, complex alerting, and system-to-system integration, Lighthammer Xacute Collaborative Execution Engine builds the required operational workflows.
Use of XML and Web services means integrations can span not only departments or plant sites, but to business partners outside the firewall.
According to Fadel, combining Illuminator and Xacute as the "Lighthammer Collaborative Manufacturing Suite" solves a critical problem facing manufacturers: lots of data but little information. "Every manufacturer has a similar range of applications, from ERP to MES, SCADA, and other factory control systems. You need to look across all of these applications to get the big picture," he says.
Lighthammer is sometimes compared to Wonderware—which pioneered use of Microsoft Windows for industrial process management—and the resemblance is more than coincidental. Both Fadel and CTO Rick Bulotta spent time with Wonderware.
Lighthammer solutions are based on Internet technologies, however—and compared to supervisory control—Lighthammer's solutions would seem to take the next step: extending visibility across the entire plant floor. Compared to execution systems, Lighthammer doesn't try to replace existing applications with its own functionality.
The typical plant-floor system lasts anywhere from five to 25 years," says Fadel, adding, "Manufacturers are not about to pull their legacy systems out anytime soon."
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