Invensys' vision for the process industries—and for itself
By Kevin Parker, editorial director -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 5/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Process manufacturing's future had its first public demonstration April 11 at Boston's JFK library. Foxboro, Mass.-based automation and IT vendor Invensys Process Systems calls "InFusion" an enterprise control system, but it might best be described as a platform for roles-based operations management, albeit one that assumes intimate connection to the enterprise (ERP) system.
"This is the most important announcement we've made in the last 20 years," said Invensys President Mike Caliel, "involving a new class of systems, more than three years of development work, and more than 60 patents, actual or pending."
InFusion is very much in the mainstream of what's new in IT in that it involves aggregation of diverse information sources, served up as a collaboration engine. Yet it is uniquely suited to the deterministic, millisecond response-rate world of process manufacturing.
Since its appearance in the workplace, software's role has been to take a serial process—work passed from one set of hands to the next—and make it concurrent, so that one software-supported individual accomplishes much in little time. The struggle has been with integration, and the incremental, contingent fashion in which computing has unfolded in the workplace.
The Internet and advances such as portals, composite applications, and service-oriented architecture make it possible to overcome integration barriers. What Invensys calls the Collaboration Wall gives operators, technicians, engineers, and managers a shared view of process control, maintenance, performance, and business displays. Not incidentally, "the wall" resembles the interface that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates uses in his "future of desktop computing" demonstration.
InFusion leverages Microsoft .NET and BizTalk Server 2004, SAP NetWeaver and xMII, ISA S95, and MIMOSA to eliminate expensive point-to-point integration of divergent systems. As dramatized at the Boston event, immediate availability of information from diverse systems leads to better decision-making in complex supply chains governed by dynamic demand signals and constrained material feeds.
Invensys Process Systems is a business unit of U.K.-based Invensys plc. Invensys Process System brands include Foxboro, Triconex, SimSci-Esscor, Avantis, and Wonderware. For fiscal year 2004/05, Process Systems reported sales of about $1.3 billion, or about 28 percent of Invensys' total sales.
Invensys says InFusion unifies Foxboro's process control, Wonderware's supervisory control, and other units' capabilities, yet it is ArchestrA—an industrial software architecture that came out of Wonderware and is based on Microsoft technologies—that is the unifying glue.
According to Peter Martin, VP of performance management, InFusion allows "solutions that span manufacturing business enterprises by crossing the boundaries of different classes of systems."
It's not the first time Invensys, or others, have talked about connecting the boardroom to the plant sensor level. But, says, Mike Bradley, president of Wonderware, things are different today. "SAP is looking to make partnerships; ArchestrA technology exists. People were talking about it before, but key enablers were missing."
