by Gary Mintchell | Oct 31, 2016 | Automation, News, Safety, Software, Technology
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.”
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 28, 2016 | Operations Management, Software
I like the push notices of email to tell me that there is new information posted somewhere. But the last email telling me about Tim Sowell’s latest post was sad. He’s stopping his run of thought leadership (truly) pieces at Operations Evolution. Sowell is a Schneider Electric Fellow and VP of System Strategy at Schneider Electric in the Common Architecture team in R&D.
This post will be my final one in this blog, as forum does not seem to be working as it once did, and we exploring new approaches to getting thought leadership out. Thank you for your interest if you feel like we should continue in some form, please post a comment.
Here’s his lead paragraph. Discover the rest of his thinking on the site.
In today’s “flat world” of demand-driven supply, the need for agility is only going to move faster in the next 10 years. This is driving leading companies to transform their operational landscape in systems, assets and culture in a shift to “smart work.” Agility transforms their thinking from a process-centric to a product and production focus, which requires a dynamic, agile work environment between assets/machines, applications and people. Aligned decisions and actions across a multi-site product value/supply chain is crucial, and requires the ongoing push of a combination of automated (embedded) wisdom and augmented Intelligence (human wisdom).
Manufacturing / production companies have accumulated tremendous amounts of data over the past decades. Mostly they do nothing with that data. People like Sowell and Stan DeVries have been making sense of all the applications that can help customers succeed in this new technological reality of actually using the data well.
Media thoughts
It’s hard work maintaining a blog–especially when it’s not your main job. I know. I’ve done this for 13 years.
But the problem for thinkers and companies is–how do you get your information out?
It used to be you could use trade press. But shrinking ad budgets and demand for shorter pieces on the Web (at least that is current thinking in many places) have changed the way companies are relating to traditional publications. If you want to get out your whole message, you need to write it yourself. With the Web and search, you can write it and then try to get links.
I’ve linked to most of Sowell’s posts. Obviously not enough of you have clicked and gone to the site. On the other hand, I think there are inflated ideas of the amount of readers. A typical magazine Website in our industry may get upwards of 75,000 views a month. Or a couple may approach 100,000. Certainly not the millions that get publicized in the general technology press.
But if you drill down, a typical article may only get a few hundred views.
The way my site is constructed, when you visit you see several posts. I’m not really selling “eyeballs”. But depending upon the tool you consult, there are several thousand who at least see the headline if you don’t actually read it all. Since my site has few distractions–just a couple of ads and a few other pieces of information–the writing is emphasized.
So, I don’t know Sowell’s traffic (he’s on Blogspot, not the best platform) and I don’t know Schneider’s expectations. But the traffic was not sufficient.
The other company blogs I follow are informative, but they have changed over time to less blog and more PR-type writing. This one was different. I’ll miss the weekly read.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 9, 2016 | Automation, Operations Management, Operator Interface, Process Control
Plant operators have been isolated in remote control rooms for decades. They tend to lose intimate knowledge of their processes as they monitor computer screens in these isolated rooms. The sounds and smells are gone. Everything is theoretical.
This system has worked. But, is it the best, most efficient, most effective use of human intelligence?
Not likely. Technologies and work processes are joining to allow plant managers to change all this.
Tim Sowell, VP and Fellow at Schneider Electric, recently shared some more of his prescient thoughts on this issue–spurred as usual by conversations with customers.
He asks, “What is the reason why users have been locked to the desk/ control room, why has this transition not happened successfully before? It is simple, the requirement to be monitoring the plant. A traditional control room is the central place alarms, notifications were traditionally piped.”
Diving into what it takes to change, Sowell goes on to say, “The user needs to empowered with situational plant awareness, freed from monitoring, shifting to the experience of exception based notification. As the user roams the plant, the user is still responsible, and aware, and able to make decisions across the plant he is responsible for even if he not in view of that a particular piece of equipment. Driving the requirement for the mobile device the user carries to allow notification, drill thru access to information and ability to collaborate so the dependency to sit in the control room has lifted.”
Two streams join to form a river. Sowell continues, “The second key part of the transformation/ enablement of an edge worker is that their work, tasks and associated materials can transfer with them. As the world moves to planned work, a user may start work task on a PC in the control room, but now move out to execute close action. As the user goes through the different steps, the associated material and actions are at his finders tips. The operational work can be generated , assigned and re directed from all terminal.s and devices.”
The first generation of this thinking formed around the rapid development of mobile devices. Before plant managers and engineers could come to grips with one technology, the next popped up. Instead of careful and prolonged development by industrial technology providers, these devices came directly from consumers. Operators and maintenance techs and engineers brought them from home. Smart phones–the power of a computer tucked into their pockets.
Sowell acknowledges it takes more than a handheld computer. “It requires the transformation to task based integrated operational environment where the ‘edge worker’ is free to move.”
The information must free them to navigate with freedom, no matter the format, no matter where they start an activity, and have access to everything.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 22, 2016 | Automation, Operations Management, Software, Technology
Industry 4.0 provokes much discussion with little understanding. It began as a German government initiative ostensibly to support the German machine building industry. The idea was picked up in a variety of forms by other governments.
Exploring Industry 4.0 leads me to Tim Sowell’s latest blog post. Tim is a Schneider Electric Fellow and VP of System Strategy at Schneider Electric in the Common Architecture team in R&D. He is also the last remaining (that I can find) true blogger in the space. The company blogs have pivoted from blog format offering information and opinion to more of a press release format—where they use the Webpage to get out a company message directly to readers rather than going through the unreliable filter of the trade press. Sowell offers thoughtful discourse on important topics of the day.
If I thought I could meet with Tim and Stan DeVries at the upcoming Wonderware user conference, I’d make plans to get down there. As it is, the trip would lead to about five weeks of travel in a row. That is more expense and time away from home than a one-person entrepreneur can afford.
Sowell lists this set of viewpoints which are discussed in the white paper:
- Industry 4.0 is about the transformation from controlling focusing on process to “controlling the product/ order” and the “product/ order being self aware”.
- Industry 4.0 is about operations transformation, not about technology.
- Industry 4.0 provides a practical strategic framework for “lean” and “agile” industrial operations.
- Industry 4.0 addresses the needs of discrete and batch manufacturing, but it needs some adaptation for the heavy process and infrastructure industries.
He adds, “Cloud computing and IT/OT convergence are often linked to implementing Industry 4.0, but these need some adaptation to address “trustworthiness” of the architectures. One emerging topic is Fog computing.”
He argues that automation and operation management technologies are more relevant than ever before. Also important are information standards such as “IEC 61850/ISO9506, ISA-95/ISO62264, PRODML etc.”
You need to go back and read his entire paper. He discusses benefits of adopting this way of thinking about manufacturing (discrete and process). He looks at use cases. And the foundation of Industry 4.0—it requires better information, not just more data.
by Gary Mintchell | May 31, 2016 | Automation, News, Process Control, Safety, Security
Schneider Electric automation President Gary Freburger talked about living in a time of immense change in the industry. Sandy Vasser of ExxonMobil (my last report) discussed some of the disruptions his team is working on. One of the disruptions relates to configurable I/O.
At the conference, Schneider Electric announced an update to its Intelligent Marshalling solution. It now contains redundancy capabilities. Likewise the Tricon CX compact safety system has been enhanced with the addition of the 3902X TMR universal I/O module.
The Foxboro Evo FBM 248 and Tricon CX 3902X remove the dependency among control and safety system design and the installation of I/O systems. Universal I/O offerings for Foxboro Evo and Triconex enable process automation professionals to seamlessly adapt to last-minute I/O design changes and provide backup to eliminate the impact of any process downtime.
“Upgrading our award-winning Intelligent Marshalling solution to include redundancy and safety capabilities demonstrates our commitment to providing the connected solutions our customers need to improve the safety, reliability and efficiency of their plants and business operations,” said Chris Lyden, senior vice president of strategy, Process Automation, Schneider Electric. “Configuring control and safety systems I/O can be costly, labor-intensive and subject to change. With their additional flexibility, the Foxboro FBM 248 and Tricon CX 3902X I/O offerings allow our customers to adjust to unforeseen module changes and errors with little impact to installation time. That can drive huge savings when it comes to project execution and operations.”
With its universal I/O and software-configurable modules, Intelligent Marshalling allows users to configure I/O points from anywhere in the plant or in the world. It also enables flexible options for future expansions and upgrades, as well as significant cost savings by reducing marshalling infrastructure, increasing I/O density per cabinet, reducing field and maintenance labor costs and drastically reducing the need for onsite replacement inventory.
Modicon Finds a Home
Modicon, and factory automation in general, has been a bit like an orphan step child for years at Schneider. The group now reports into the automation group under Freburger. It’s a learning experience for the process automation people—new language, new distribution, new service options. But things seem to coalescing well.
The PlantStruxure PES hybrid control system, build on a Modicon PLC platform, received its moment in the sun at the conference. Schneider Electric has added redundant controllers to the PlantStruxure PES system. Today, 50 percent of PlantStruxure PES projects require at least one pair of redundant controllers within the configuration. PES V4.2 meets the next generation of requirements with the M580 ePAC and the ability to lock down ports within a single configuration environment. With the highest levels of cybersecurity available on the market, PES V4.2 ensures nearly 100 percent uptime for customer systems.
“As IT and OT converge, we need solutions that boost plant connectivity and security,” said Lyden. “PlantStruxure PES enhances the ability of plant operators, engineers and managers to take better advantage of process and energy management data, which better enables them to improve maintenance, increase asset reliability and uncover additional operational efficiencies, all in a more secure environment. By making our PlantStruxure PES automation system secure and future proof by design, we are meeting the needs of tomorrow’s production facilities, today.”
A core feature of the Modicon M580 ePAC is its Ethernet-based architecture. Integration into the PES solution improves system management and provides customers with a level of standard communication, guaranteeing a future-proof system. Additionally, new services will be available for engineering and commissioning, which will make navigating a control program easier, as well as improve performance when making project changes. PlantStruxure PES V4.2 is also equipped with ready-to-use application and industry libraries, allowing systems to be built more quickly and with lower engineering costs. And by integrating energy-management features from other Schneider Electric automation and power devices, such as Altivar drives, the system will help users realize higher energy cost savings.
