Diverse capabilities united in an IT infrastructure for the plant floor

Invensys Process Systems is a business unit of U.K.-based Invensys plc. Its 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.

Perhaps the biggest story for automation and plant-floor IT vendors in recent years are efforts being made toward forging a flexible plant-floor IT infrastructure that will ease integration and allow enterprise and supply chain collaboration. Invensys has been at the forefront of these efforts.

In April, Invensys unveiled InFusion, which it calls an enterprise control system, but might better 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 at the time," 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.

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 event marking its release, 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 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 glue that brings it all together.

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."

This is done through low-cost software interfaces to proprietary plant-floor systems and open standards for those that support communication standards; full open communication throughout the business enterprise; a performance management methodology that tends to unify operations, maintenance, and financial management viewpoints; and a common engineering environment across all plant-floor domains.

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."