The current dilemma for industrial IT is facing up to elaborate business needs for realtime production and process information, by connecting to a plethora of disparate IT applications, plant systems and devices.
Integrating these disparate systems to consolidate manufacturing data is either extremely expensive, or nearly impossible. If these disparate systems could be replaced with something simple, yet advanced enough to provide all the functionality required. Daniel Coetzee, GE Infrastructure's GE Fanuc Automation division business manager for sub-Saharan Africa believes that GE Fanuc's Proficy is such a solution.
The Proficy intelligent production solution integrates a range of applications and services to optimise the level of productivity on an enterprise. It has been developed to build intelligence into processes - gathering, analysing, and transforming data into information, enabling the user to act in realtime to optimise results.
"The demand for speed, agility and responsiveness in production operations has never been greater," says Coetzee. "As a result, realtime performance management - which offers the most significant opportunity for revolutionising manufacturing - must be the cornerstone for every profitable company. GE understands this critical need and can deliver the seamless, knowledge-based infrastructure that brings together business and manufacturing for improved performance across an entire enterprise."
Featuring a wide range of unified modules to meet individual requirements, Proficy allows information to be shared freely between business and plant floor applications, helping organisations to better plan, execute, and deliver to meet customer needs and improve their competitiveness.
Modules are focused on specific production requirements and can be implemented individually or as part of an overall solution. The Proficy open architecture allows companies to start with a single point solution and expand as needed - from a single machine to a production line to a plant to an enterprise, from a single machine operator to thousands of global users.
By embracing and extending a company's existing equipment and technologies, Proficy also helps users take full advantage of an installed base of automation assets for faster implementation and return. According to AMR Research analysts, Bill Swanton and Alison Smith, in the Alert, "Enterprise manufacturing intelligence helps global manufacturers raise performance and responsiveness", 26 November, 2003, "GE Fanuc is aggressively positioning itself as a plant intelligence provider. GE Fanuc has a well-articulated manufacturing intelligence vision and the most cohesive offering of all the automation vendors."
In the comment made by Craig Resnick, ARC Advisory Group research director, he reports: "GE's Proficy provides a common basis for using manufacturing information from the plant floor to enterprise systems and business partners, delivering manufacturing visualisation and information to people, processes, and applications. This results in new performance capabilities for users at the plant-level and throughout the distributed manufacturing enterprise and supply network."
Its authors say that the Proficy solution has several industry-leading features. Especially significant is the single integrated infrastructure that is based on a common component framework (CCF). "Although other solution providers highlight an integrated infrastructure, Proficy solutions are integrated with a common data model. This enables customers to use one data model across all products to more effectively manage their operations and reduce their TCO. While other infrastructures are focused much more on the distribution of data and control level functionality, Proficy is focused more on the single configuration of data into a common plant reference and data model," says Coetzee.
Proficy Intelligent Production Solutions provide the following capabilities:
Realtime information portal
This new Web-based tool for accessing, analysing and visualising production information enables companies to collect, aggregate, and disseminate data from multiple disparate backend sources and securely deliver a personalised view with a Web browser. This timely view of trends, reports, graphics and KPIs on one screen allows users to act on realtime information, resulting in better and faster decision-making. The solution delivers data to ERP, supply chain and CRM, extending the investment in these systems.
Plant performance and execution
Proficy offers automated production scheduling, tracking, broadcast, and routing control. These newly expanded systems enable flexibility in executing manufacturing schedules from ERP systems, monitoring production flow through the manufacturing facility, making automated routing decisions, and synchronising subsystem delivery including external suppliers.
Proficy plant applications
These provide powerful efficiency, quality, production, and batch analysis capabilities to manufacturing operations, enabling production managers to gain clear insight into how products are actually produced. At the core of the plant applications is unified, easy-to-configure 'plant model' and notification service that enables users to define how their products are manufactured based on their actual plant layout, product specifications and product routing instructions. The plant applications automatically generate intelligent KPIs and alarms so that managers can monitor performance and receive notification when exceptions occur.
Proficy batch execution
This delivers all that is needed to develop a powerful and flexible batch monitoring and control solution - with a powerful graphical interface and a diverse array of features which have been specifically designed to help address FDA regulation 21 CFR Part 11.
Proficy Tracker
This creates exciting new opportunities for raising productivity and cutting costs by giving the user the ability to monitor the progress of each serialised and non-serialised item that moves through the production or packaging process. The user has the continuous flow of information that is needed to optimise the manufacturing process, while managing inventory levels and locations, scheduling resources, and routing materials much more effectively.
Plant data repository
Proficy Historian is a plant-wide data historian that collects, archives and distributes large volumes of realtime, plant floor process information at high speed. GE believes that its Proficy Historian represents a leap in the performance, utility and affordability of plant-wide data historians. Scalable to 250 000 data points per server, Proficy Historian delivers high-volume data collection and retrieval, without sacrificing speed or performance.
Asset management
Proficy Enterprise Asset Management is a powerful Web-based asset management solution designed to keep a company and the equipment it relies upon running at optimal efficiency and peak profitability. Proficy EAM enables its users to gain true insight into their organisation's asset utilisation patterns, enabling them to more efficiently use maintenance materials, identify and eliminate problem areas within the company's maintenance operations and significantly reduce the expense and aggravation of unscheduled downtime events, missing equipment and other asset-related concerns.
Proactive monitoring of equipment
This can be both on site and remote - and permits early recognition of problems and identification of corrective actions to dramatically increase user productivity and reduce downtime. Enabling users to remotely access information about their production facilities, Proficy remote monitoring and diagnostics makes it possible to quickly ascertain the status of operations, troubleshoot a problem or collaborate between multiple sites anytime, from anywhere in the world.
Proficy change management
This provides all of the tools necessary for tracking and managing software changes. As a client/server system, it offers version control, audit trails, security, scheduled backups and compares, and reporting capabilities that streamline your operations and help you meet regulatory requirements with ease. As a result, manufacturers can achieve data security and greatly enhanced disaster recovery, enabling them to maintain operations, increase security, improve productivity and meet crucial regulatory requirements.
HMI/scada
Proficy HMI/scada has powerful client/server-based HMI/scada solutions that provide process visualisation, data acquisition, alarm management and supervisory control over manufacturing and production processes. Proficy HMI/scada gives operators and process engineers the power and security to precisely monitor and control every aspect of their process, equipment and resources. The result is a faster response to production issues, with improved quality, reduced waste, faster time-to-market and increased profitability.
Integrated quality
Quality of parts, products and process is critical to predictable production yields that make key business decisions possible and result in sellable goods. The key to quality involves monitoring appropriate parameters, traceability, quick corrective implementation, sustainability of high levels of quality production, and compliance with industry regulations.
The Proficy Shop Floor SPC family of data collection software is built from the factory floor up to reflect how the enterprise works. The software incorporates capabilities that provide the user with the flexibility and control needed for data collection, analysis and reporting.
Control and operator interface
Proficy provides a universal development environment for machine-level control, including logic, motion and machine-level visualisation. Web-enabled functionality such as a built-in Web server delivers realtime data across the enterprise while drag-and-drop editing and industry-standard technologies enable fast, powerful object-oriented programming.
Its strong commitment to the Proficy architecture means that GE Fanuc will continue to bring new and innovative modules to users. Future modules include Workflow, allowing users to encapsulate complex business rules for a variety of tasks such as business system data exchanges and supplier non-conformance; enterprise reporting providing powerful business reporting from the Proficy Plant Datamart; and a plant-wide alarming and advanced notification system integrating alarms throughout the enterprise into a single environment and making use of modern wireless technologies for notification. Learn more about Proficy at www.proficy.biz
For more information contact Daniel Coetzee, GE Fanuc Automation, 031 583 2602, [email protected], www.gefanuc.com
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