Serious about MES
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2003 6:00:00 AM
GE Fanuc Automation, a Charlottesville, Va.-based vendor of industrial automation solutions and an affiliate of GE Industrial Systems, is displaying the acquisitive nature of its parent company, General Electric, by purchasing Green Bay, Wis.-based manufacturing execution system (MES) vendor Mountain Systems.
The move follows GE Fanuc's purchase of supervisory control vendor Intellution last year from Emerson. Intellution previously worked with Mountain Systems to develop iHistorian, its plantwide data historian. Mountain Systems' flagship MES—Proficy for Manufacturing—uses plant historians as a foundation for plant-floor information.
"It's kind of like old friends teaming up together," says Kevin Roach, a GE Fanuc vice president. "The technology stack between [Proficy and GE Fanuc's plant intelligence solutions] is plug and play. There literally are no integration issues."
Roach adds that Proficy is well suited as "an MES for the masses," stating that the system is used in 11 manufacturing verticals, and is highly configurable. "It's easily customizable without programming, and very much an application—not a set of tools," he says.
The system also integrates with other historians from OSIsoft and AspenTech, according to GE Fanuc. Roach believes this effectively "seeds the market" for Proficy with tens of thousands of sites that already use plant historians. Proficy also integrates with multiple supervisory control packages, which, according to Roach, gives GE Fanuc an MES "we can quickly deploy at a customer's site, layer it in with existing solutions, and add value."
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