I have a little batch of process automation and industry news involving predictive technologies—two acquisitions and a new safety product. Congratulations to Mike Brooks and the team at Mtell for a good exit. Also congratulations to the MaxEAM folks. Finally, an important new take on process automation safety from PAS.
MTell Acquired by Aspen Technology
Aspen Technology Inc., a provider of software and services to the process industries, announced it has acquired Mtelligence Corp. (known as Mtell), a San Diego, California-based pioneer in the field of predictive and prescriptive maintenance for asset performance optimization.
Mtell products enable companies to increase asset utilization and avoid unplanned downtime by accurately predicting when equipment failures will occur, understanding why they will occur, and prescribing what to do to avoid the failure.
The products provide a low-touch, rapidly deployable, end-to-end solution that combines a deep understanding of operations and maintenance processes, real-time and historical equipment data and cutting-edge machine learning technologies. As a result, customers can:
- Monitor the health of equipment, detect early failure symptoms, diagnose their root-cause and recommend the best responses to avoid the failure
- Continually learn and automatically adapt to changing equipment and process behaviors
- Automatically share findings across a network of similar equipment to improve the overall process performance.
Some of the world’s largest process manufacturing companies use Mtell. Customer results have shown significant benefits including improved industrial safety, removal of risk, reduced failures, enhanced productivity and increased profitability.
Mtell products include:
- Previse – Mtell’s flagship end-to-end machine learning solution that monitors equipment health 24/7, detects early indicators of degradation or failures, diagnoses the root cause and prescribes responses that prevent breakdowns and unplanned downtime.
- Basis – A connected condition monitoring application that facilitates collaboration between operations and maintenance organizations to determine the best course of action for equipment alert conditions.
- Reservoir – A high performance, scalable, big data repository that captures, manages and synchronizes large volumes of time series, event and asset data from multiple sources.
- Summit – A remote monitoring center application for monitoring, analyzing and benchmarking asset performance.
The purchase price of the transaction was $37M. Additional terms are disclosed in AspenTech’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the first quarter of Fiscal 2017 filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
Schneider Electric Adds to Asset Management Portfolio
Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, announced the acquisition of MaxEAM, a software company with complementary applications that extend Avantis.PRO Enterprise Asset Management. The acquisition further solidifies the portfolio and adds valuable domain expertise to Schneider Electric’s existing team.
Schneider Electric and MaxEAM have a long standing business relationship working together to deliver successful customer projects on a global scale. The acquisition gives customers a single point of contact for support and delivery services, and more closely aligns future product development.
“The strength of our asset management portfolio continues to grow, both organically and through acquisition. MaxEAM enhances the functionality of our Avantis.PRO offering, securing the investment our customers have made in our products,” said Rob McGreevy, Global Vice President, Software at Schneider Electric. “The addition of MaxEAM subject matter expertise and technology will allow us continued expansion of our industry-leading Enterprise APM platform.”
“Our advanced technology linked to mobile work execution streamlines processes, adding tremendous capabilities for mobile workers,” said Eric Stern, President of MaxEAM. “Schneider Electric’s Enterprise APM platform is the broadest in the market today. I’m excited that our people and technology will be an integral component to the overall offering.”
Two years ago Schneider Electric acquired InStep Software, adding advanced predictive analytics. That acquisition furthered its delivery of Enterprise APM solutions leveraging the Industrial IoT, helping to close the gap between IT and OT.
PAS Launches Process Safety Analytics Software
PAS Inc., the solution provider of process safety, cybersecurity, and asset reliability for the energy, power, and process industries announces the general availability of its newest product, PAS IPL Assurance. The software provides real-time predictive analytics on the health and availability of the safety instrumented systems (SIS), Alarm Management Systems, and other Independent Protection Layers (IPL). In addition to managing operational risk, IPL Assurance reduces compliance costs by automatically reporting on the SIS performance during a demand on the safety system.
PAS IPL Assurance delivers actionable information on safety instrumented systems, alarm systems, control loops, and operational boundaries to streamline compliance activities and expose operational risk. As a result, plant personnel can mitigate abnormal situations before they impact plant safety, reliability, and profitability.
IPL Assurance provides the following analytics, alert, and visualization features:
• Safety instrumented function (SIF) performance management,
• Testing and maintenance management,
• Demand on safety system rate tracking,
• Status of safety related alarms,
• Safety system bypass management, and
• Safety and operational risk dashboard.
“IPL Assurance provides up-to-date IPL lifecycle management so that operations can immediately ascertain the overall risk profile of any facility,” said Mark Carrigan, Senior Vice President of Global Operations at PAS. “This visibility from an automated single source of truth is essential to preventing critical safety incidents and supporting IEC and OSHA compliance requirements.”
