by Gary Mintchell | Sep 30, 2014 | Data Management, Operations Management, Software
It’s a Game Changer! That’s the theme of the 2014 Schneider Electric Software Global Conference in Orlando. I’ve been to more than 100 of these things, but this the first one that kicked off with a high school marching band.
The first news of the conference was the agreement to acquire InStep Software, a provider of real-time performance management and predictive asset analytics software and solutions. Schneider expects this acquisition to deepen its presence in the power and energy market. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2014, subject to customary regulatory and other closing conditions.
“Acquiring InStep Software is indicative of our commitment to delivering game-changing technology and powerful new solutions that improve efficiency, manage risk and drive higher levels of customer value,” said Ravi Gopinath, Ph.D., executive vice president, Schneider Electric Global Solutions, Software Business. “They have a proven, experienced team who are dedicated to helping their customers achieve new levels of value, performance and profitability, and we are delighted to welcome them to Schneider Electric.”
InStep Software will continue to be managed by its existing executive team, adding approximately 70 employees to Schneider Electric’s operations in the United States. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Schneider recently had announced a new extension to the SimSci product line. Now we have an acquisition. I take this to mean that Schneider has seriously decided to become a software company. I’ve never thought of the company as having a commitment to software.
Gopinath just used a word I used some time ago. Stability. These manufacturing software companies (Wonderware, SimSci, Avantis plus Foxboro, Triconex, etc.) under the instability of Invensys were threatened. Perhaps the stability of Schneider Electric will help these grow and prosper.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 18, 2014 | Automation, Data Management, News, Operations Management, Organizations, Standards, Technology
OGI Pilot
MIMOSA, an Operations and Maintenance Information Open System Alliance association, held its annual meeting last week at the Chevron Innovation Center in Houston.
The most amazing thing about MIMOSA, the organization, and the Oil&Gas Interoperability Pilot specifically, is the amount of progress they have made over the past few years. Some of the work has been ongoing for over a decade. Emphases have shifted over time reflecting the needs of the moment and the readiness of technology.
MIMOSA is a not-for-profit trade association dedicated to developing and encouraging the adoption of open information standards for Operations and Maintenance in manufacturing, fleet, and facility environments. MIMOSA’s open standards enable collaborative asset lifecycle management in both commercial and military applications.
Interoperability, not integration
The theme was manufacturing software interoperability from design to operations and maintenance. I use the term manufacturing in a generic sense, because I couldn’t find a more general, yet specific, term. The initial impetus for this work lies in the oil & gas industry.
MIMOSA’s strategy is a “federation of standards” approach. It does not try to write standards for every model, data, or object. It incorporates existing standards and attempts to tie them together into a workable system.
The beauty of this lies in the ability to just use data models from a variety of relevant sources and focus on the needs of owner/operators.
The OGI Pilot demonstration project, first unveiled in 2012 at ISA Automation Week, revealed that it is possible to pass live data from the engineering system (Aveva, Bentley, Intergraph in this case) into an operations & maintenance database (see the image accompanying the article).
Solves big headache
The beauty of the system is that as-designed data can be passed to operations. With proper business processes and management of change, updates can be made live. This means that when the project moves to handover and start up, engineers and technicians can find information they need quickly and can have a high degree of trust in that data. The way it is today, pdfs of the engineering data are handed over. These are hard to search. They are also hard to keep current.
Non-threatening
Two roadblocks have stood in the way of progress. One is that the voice of the owner/operator is often fragmented. They often settle for totally proprietary solutions entailing custom programming at great expense and little assurance of reliability. The other is the reluctance on the part of suppliers (understandably) to be told by a standard how to write their data.
Using the federated standards approach with what I’ll call translators, each software application can expose data in a format that allows interchange with other software applications without anyone tinkering with what’s “under the hood.”
Other standards organizations have failed on this latter point. They have tried to construct a standard that forced products to commodity status. This not only threatens suppliers, it also threatens innovation. The MIMOSA / OGI approach does away with that constraint.
We are starting to get to where the owner/operators need the technology to be. This work will benefit everyone.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 23, 2014 | Automation, Internet of Things, News, Operations Management, Technology
Phoenix Contact has recognized how important manufacturing software is in today’s integrated automation systems and, although it isn’t mentioned in the release, achieving real benefits from the coming Internet of Things technology wave.
In this press release, Phoenix Contact announces that it is integrating its software unit, KW-Software GmbH, into its Control Systems business unit and changing its name to Phoenix Contact Software on January 1, 2015.
Current KW-Software Managing Director Andreas Orzelski and Detleve Kuschgke, Director Research & Development in the Control Systems business unit at Phoenix Contact, will serve as the Executive Board at the new Phoenix Contact Software GmbH. Staff at the Lemgo site will join with the software developers from Phoenix Contact, who have been working at the Centrum Industrial IT (CIIT) in Lemgo for the past four years.
“Software is increasingly seen as a differentiator on the market. IT and production are becoming more closely integrated. That’s why it’s paramount that we expand our software expertise in order to sustainably expand our control systems portfolio and our industrial solution services,” says Roland Bent, Executive Vice President Marketing & Development, Member of the Board, at Phoenix Contact.
“This step allows us to pool our collective resources in order to be strategically oriented towards the technological requirements of Industry 4.0. The new CIIT building provides us with more space for further growth. KW-Software’s existing business with external customers will continue under the new name. This way, customers can take advantage of a wider range of software technologies from the Phoenix Contact Group,” adds Andreas Orzelski, current Managing Director at KW-Software.
“Fully integrating KW-Software into the Phoenix Contact company demonstrates further commitment by Phoenix Contact to the Control System Technology business,” said Dave Skelton, Vice President and General Manager of Phoenix Contact Development and Manufacturing. “Phoenix Contact’s ‘Solutions for the Future’ are increasingly enhanced by software. The KW-Software USA team will join our Phoenix Contact Control Systems team in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”
KW-Software GmbH was founded in Lemgo in 1982 and is recognized as a global leader in the development of control software based on the IEC 61131 programming languages and IEC 61508 safety technologies. Additionally, KW Software provides Profinet stacks, integration engineering, and Profinet single-chip interface and engineering tools for device manufacturers. The company has been part of the Phoenix Contact Group since 2001.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 18, 2014 | Automation, Internet of Things, Operations Management, Technology
The Internet of Things (IoT). Ah, what visions it conjurs. Sensors everywhere. Everything connected.Managers and engineers have the ability to know more about the status of their plants and factories than ever before. They could diagnose, collect data for future development and predictive maintenance, and have a window into all operations.
We have talked about this for years. The reality draws nearer every day. But still, we don’t seem to be seeing adoption and benefits.
My old friend Mark Davidson who is now an analyst with LNS Research, has just posted to his blog a piece called, “What’s Needed to Accelerate IoT in Manufacturing?”
In it he presents some background and discusses some hurdles that remain.
“Small startups, mid-sized companies and major players like ABB, Accenture, AT&T, Bosch, Cisco, Ericsson, GE, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, PTC, Rockwell Automation, SAP, and Siemens are all investing big and staking claim to manufacturing IoT as a key area of future growth. New alliances have been formed over the past year or so – including the Industrial IP Advantage (Cisco, Panduit, and Rockwell Automation) and the Industrial Internet Consortium (AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel).”
The hurdles:
“We concur with the three key hurdles that are briefly stated in the recent GreenBiz blog article http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/05/12/greenbiz-101-what-do-you-need-know-about-internet-things, which is a 101 primer on the IoT, and in the first post of this LNS Research blog series I’d like to expand on Hurdle #1 a bit further.
Hurdle #1: The standards to ensure interoperability are relatively immature when compared to other Internet, enterprise, and manufacturing software systems.
Hurdle #2: Properly addressing new security issues associated with the IoT.
Hurdle #3: Increased costs to add intelligent devices and equipment and the ROI of manufacturing IoT applications.
With today’s systems and applications, we are used to fieldbus standards with interoperable device information profiles, information standards for application to application use – like OPC/OPC UA, and higher level manufacturing information integration models like OAGIS, MIMOSA, ISA 88 and ISA 95. Even with these broadly deployed, there are vendor-specific solutions that fill the remaining integration and interoperability gaps.”
Yes, standards are that double-edged sword. Industries need agreed-upon standards for everyone to build on and accelerate customer adoption. Yet, sometimes developers try to pay lipservice to standards while trying to lock in customers to their proprietary solution. Still, widespread adoption often depends upon neutral standards—unless one company, like a Facebook, can achieve dominance in a market segment and lock all the competitors out. I don’t know if that will happen in manufacturing.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 4, 2014 | Operations Management, Software
Twice in a week—more news about companies incorporating the Cloud to expand the applications of their manufacturing software. In this release, Infor announced its use of Amazon Web Services Cloud.
Obviously proud of its new suite of products, the company notes, “Infor CloudSuite provides beautiful software with deep industry functionality and a flexible, subscription-based delivery model that significantly reduces upfront IT expenditure.”
Each industry suite within Infor CloudSuite is built by unifying multiple applications that historically were deployed independently to holistically support core business functions by industry. This core, along with fast and simple provisioning. Infor believes that this will “Change the way enterprise software is delivered to and consumed by customers.”
“SaaS today refers primarily to HCM, CRM or another edge application, never to mission-critical business operations,” said Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor. “Infor CloudSuite redefines cloud for the enterprise, delivering the first full suite of business applications purpose-built by industry running in a public cloud through Amazon Web Services.”
“Customers want help figuring out how to move more of their operations into the AWS Cloud. They want to shift their resources to focus on what they do best, rather than on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing IT and complex software,” said Andy Jassy, SVP, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are excited that Infor is addressing these needs using the AWS platform. Infor CloudSuite on AWS delivers a simplified and enhanced user experience, across a multitude of industries, and provides all the agility, elasticity, and cost benefits of the AWS Cloud to enterprise customers around the world.”
Infor will leverage the AWS cloud infrastructure to allow customers to take advantage of Amazon’s expertise and economies of scale to access resources when they need them, on demand and with auto-scaling built into the Infor applications. Infor is in the process of consolidating existing subscribers and transitioning current internal infrastructure to the AWS platform. AWS provides services in 10 Regions, with 25 Availability Zones and 51 Amazon CloudFront Edge locations globally.
“AWS has the best and most advanced cloud infrastructure in the world, providing a delivery model, cost structure, and focus on operational excellence that perfectly complements and enhances our products,” said Phillips. “Moreover, the tie between Infor and AWS is strengthened through a common focus on customer experience, rapid-pace of innovation, and standards-based architecture.”
Infor plans to roll out industry suites, delivered on AWS, throughout 2014, beginning this spring with Infor CloudSuite Automotive, Infor CloudSuite Aerospace & Defense, and Infor CloudSuite Hospitality. Early this summer Infor expects to deliver Infor CloudSuite Corporate, with a core of best-in-class financials and Infor’s complete human capital management suite.
The Infor CloudSuite platform also includes:
- Analytics – CloudSuite Analytic Packs provide industry components, data models, and industry dashboards to transform information into actionable insights
- Technology – Infor ION middleware, Infor Ming.leTM social collaboration, Infor Analytics, and Infor Mongoose development platform
- Core Enterprise Management – Infor LN, Infor M3, Infor Lawson, Infor SyteLine, and Infor SunSystems
- High Value Extension Applications – Infor EAM, Infor Expense Management, Infor HR Service Delivery (Enwisen), Infor PeopleAnswers Talent Science, Infor Learning Management, Infor Workforce Management, Infor Epiphany Interaction Advisor, Infor Orbis Marketing Resource Management, Infor Product Configuration Management, Infor Supplier Exchange, and more.
