What matters at the plant
Automation giants pitch architecture, while a larger cast plays up plant intelligence and performance apps
By Roberto Michel, editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 3/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
Anyone who's been watching the market for industrial automation and plant management systems the last several years has witnessed the major automation vendors steadily building and buying their way up the applications food chain. Beginning with their strength in supervisory control software, the automation vendors have been building or acquiring batch management software, manufacturing execution packages, and Web-based manufacturing intelligence solutions.
To the casual eye, it might seem that the automation vendors are destined to rule the plant applications landscape. But while few would argue with the increasing software clout of vendors such as ABB, GE Fanuc Automation, Invensys, Rockwell Automation, and Siemens Energy & Automation, the plant applications landscape remains fairly diverse. The reasons for this diversity are many, but include the continuing need for manufacturing execution systems (MES), and interest in manufacturing intelligence applications.
"Mainly, what senior management wants is a more effective global view of performance at all of a company's plants," says Bill Swanton, a VP with Boston-based analyst firm AMR Research. "In essence, they want to manage their plants as a fleet, and that's a core driver for applications at the plant level today."
Of course, the big plant automation vendors also have best-in-class software for manufacturing intelligence, not just supervisory control software. What's more, automation giants such as ABB and Invensys contend that beyond integration, the new architectures also serve as frameworks for a more standard, reusable approach to plant information management.
Experts concede the automation vendors are a force to be reckoned with. Says Swanton, "To some degree, you'll continue to see more of the smaller vendors get bought up by the big industrial companies."
Handle on operations
Manufacturing intelligence has been a major area of expansion for automation vendors, putting them up against the likes of vendors such as Lighthammer. MES vendors—long the middle layer in the control, execute, plan paradigm—also now focus on providing analytics for performance management.
Datasweep, for instance, positions its Advantage suite as an operations performance management platform. While the product handles execution, the vendor has long included data marts as part of the product, and says the level of detail its system manages supports issues including product lifecycle costs and regulatory compliance.
PEMSTAR, a Rochester, Minn.-based electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider, uses the Datasweep solution as a foundation for operational excellence. "We don't normally use the OPM term, but we do look at the system as the means of linking together everything we are doing on the plant floor, and providing the visibility to process trends, while also storing the data and getting the detail that will help us determine how to do things better next time," says Chris Towns, director of IT implementations for PEMSTAR.
As a contract manufacturer to major electronics OEMs, says Towns, PEMSTAR needed a system to both exert control over execution and to support external communication with customers. "Not only do we know where every product is at all times, we know what our production performance is," he says. "The system also keeps us from running into severe problems, because it automatically stops a process if it detects too many defects."
One of the key benefits of the multi-plant deployment, says Towns, is that PEMSTAR now has better data it can share with customers on metrics such as units per hour, comparing actuals with the quoted rate. Previously, says Towns, this metric was difficult to track. From an internal perspective, the system is effective at actually improving operations. At one site, says Towns, the system helped reduce rework by about 20 percent.
Advantage, however, isn't the only system within PEMSTAR's manufacturing applications landscape. The company also uses an ERP system from MAPICS to handle material planning, orders, and higher-level transactions. In fact, says Towns, a mix of information from Advantage and the ERP system makes for a key source of operations metrics accessed via a portal by senior executives, including COO Roy Bauer.
From procurement to build
At Mack Technologies, a Westford, Mass.-based EMS provider, the Visiprise Manufacturing MES is used for plant-level decision support and execution, as well as to feed production-fulfillment data into the company's reporting tools, says Rick Anselmo, manager of information systems and services. Mack deployed the Visiprise solution to replace a custom-built shop-floor control system that Mack had inherited when it bought a factory. But the company soon realized it needed to replace the legacy system, says Anselmo, "with something off the shelf that manages execution, from procurement right through to the build process."
Today, Mack has successfully deployed the solution at half of its facilities worldwide. In Mack's industry, says Anselmo, MES is critical to meeting customer requirements. "One of the key components behind winning and keeping new business is our shop- floor control system," he says. "It provides us with the ability to manage and ship quality product to our customers within very tight delivery time lines."
Anselmo says the MES has effective decision-support tools for "managing the build process we want to dictate." Visiprise has built some higher-level reporting functions into the product, but at Mack, says Anselmo, a reporting tool from Oracle Corp. is used for enterprise-level reports, extracting production-related data from the MES. "We see two levels of reporting," Anselmo says. "One is at the production control level, and the other is more at the work-order and order-fulfillment level."
The automation giants also have MES success stories, and vendors such as Invensys are able to tout greater engineering productivity via the use of their architectures. Mark Davidson, a VP with Wonderware, an Invensys company that offers plant intelligence software, says the Invensys ArchestrA framework supports reuse.
Recent surveys conducted by Invensys, says Davidson, show that manufacturers have a strong interest in being able to reuse the work that goes into establishing plant information management solutions. "Customers are starting to standardize around integration tools," he says. "It's what the customers want, because standardization drives best practices."
Thinus van Schoor, manager of automation for SABMiller's South African division, based in Johannesburg, says the brewer uses ArchestrA to integrate with control hardware from multiple vendors. More important, he says, the architecture supports engineering reuse and makes the brewer's plant infrastructure more flexible. "We use [ArchestrA] as a common architecture that ties together our underlying control infrastructure with our plant information and batch management systems," he says. "Instead of tying us in with one vendor, ArchestrA actually is going to help us achieve the opposite, because we'll use it as a common architecture to integrate with applications from various vendors."
Following the successful implementation of ArchestrA at its training center, SABMiller is using the framework at its Prospecton brewery near Durban, South Africa. The large project involves using the framework to tie together data coming from PLCs with various applications for supervisory control, plant analysis, and batch management, says van Schoor. Some of these applications are from Wonderware, says van Schoor, but the batch management software SABMiller uses in South Africa is from Rockwell.
According to van Schoor, the main benefits of the architecture fall under two areas: 1) greater productivity in automation engineering; and 2) greater system flexibility. However, he adds, those benefits come from a combination of the architecture and adherence to ISA standards, including the S-88 standard for batch management, and the S-95 standard for integration of plant systems with enterprise-level systems. "Prior to starting with ArchestrA," advises van Schoor, "you should have a base set of standards."
By using ArchestrA as a "shell" for the standards, he adds, SABMiller gains a flexible foundation for its plant systems. And while SABMiller hasn't yet completely quantified the savings in engineering productivity, looking at just one project step at Prospecton—the configuration of HMI nodes and controllers—the use of the architecture helped cut engineering time by up to 40 percent.
Performance-minded
Part of the appeal of the new automation frameworks is that they can centralize the setup of core services such as "historization" used by multiple applications. Some experts, however, are skeptical as to whether such efficiencies will draw users away from proven applications. As AMR's Swanton puts it, "Greater reuse is fine, but most manufacturers aren't going to be interested in replacing working applications like data historians if those systems are doing the job."
Kevin Roach, VP of global solutions with GE Fanuc Automation, says GE Fanuc often integrates with third-party systems. "We go into a customer's site and look at the existing infrastructure to see what's required," says Roach. "We leverage that infrastructure, then look at ways to apply some analysis and Six Sigma tools on top of it."
As for integration technology, Roach says automation vendors need an effective means of data access and support for open interfaces, but not necessarily an architecture. "Openness should be judged on how often your systems are part of a multivendor environment," he says.
Dave Smith, director of strategic marketing for OSIsoft, a vendor of real-time performance management (RtPM) software, says OSIsoft does not see the automation frameworks as a threat. OSIsoft has roots in the plant historian market, with its PI System being one of the most widely deployed historians. OSIsoft has added portal, alerting, and other performance management capabilities to deliver an RtPM platform.
Smith doesn't see users ditching PI System deployments because of other vendors' architectures. "There are just too many advantages to using PI for users to abandon it," says Smith, adding, "and, by the way, it's very easy to set up and use."
Smith says the real battle will involve who offers the best RtPM platform. Such a platform needs a scalable historian, says Smith, but much of its power comes from the ability to alert managers to trends in real time. "Real-time performance management is business oriented, rather than engineering and tools oriented," says Smith. "The value lies in helping manufacturers make decisions at the right time—maybe not in true real time—but quickly enough to impact performance."
Automation vendors, for their part, say they also are well positioned to turn the real-time world of process data into useful information and disseminate it to managers. As Mike Bradley, president of Wonderware, puts it, "Trying to drink in real-time data is like trying to drink from a fire hose—it's just not practical. Fundamentally, manufacturers are looking for a framework that makes it easier to make sense of real-time data, apply some analytics, and drive performance to the next level."
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