by Gary Mintchell | Oct 15, 2013 | Automation, Data Management, Operations Management, Technology
Rocking out to the Beatles “Revolution”, Invensys software announced “The Industrial Software Revolution Begins Now.” About 1,000 people gathered at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas for the second Invensys conference in a little over a month. Last month it was the process solutions side of the company. This conference focuses on Wonderware, SimSci-Esscor and Avantis.
Expect a stream of new product announcements this week.
This morning I had breakfast with Saadi Kermani and Maryanne Steidinger to discuss mobile, cloud and related technologies. Hint—you can find an app on iOS, Android and Windows 8, just search SmartGlance in your app store. Invensys Wonderware has been on the leading edge of mobility for several years.
System Platform 2014
Invensys kicked off the event with the release of its Wonderware InTouch 2014 and Wonderware System Platform 2014 software. Delivering powerful, additional capabilities to its flagship HMI and supervisory offerings, the new software promises to improve operator awareness, optimize performance and minimize disruptions during startup, operation and shutdown.
“While other HMI providers have been focusing solely on graphics to improve the operator experience, Invensys has been collaborating closely with some of the world’s most recognized industrial companies—large and small—to understand their most pressing challenges and issues, and then devise the most innovative ways to solve them,” said John Krajewski, director of HMI and supervisory product management for Invensys.
One major operating challenge is the ability to more quickly identify and address abnormal situations before they impact operations. The company’s Wonderware InTouch 2014 and Wonderware System Platform 2014 software take what the company labels “a revolutionary new approach to HMI design” and supervisory systems by providing new capabilities in alarm management, color representation, information presentation and window navigation, all intended to maximize user performance.
The updates include new object templates; styles for consistent and standardized colors and fonts in HMI applications; and consistency in the way alarms are represented throughout systems, all simply managed from a central repository.
“Utilizing 15 years of human interface studies, we have delivered a toolkit that transforms the way industrial users design and interface with their HMI,” Krajewski said. “We’ve moved from simply presenting data to displaying information in context. Instead of developing a library of ‘graphics,’ these new capabilities enable application builders to focus on creating content, easily assembling the most effective HMI applications and user interfaces for abnormal situation management.
“Initial testing indicates that these new styles and standardized colors can help users reduce situation interpretation time by 40 percent and can lead to a five-fold improvement in detecting abnormal situations before they occur. After the initial detection, our enhanced navigation can improve the success rate for handling abnormal situations by as much as 37 percent, and we’ve seen a 41 percent reduction in the time required to complete tasks.”
These new capabilities implement and encourage best-practices to bring clarity, consistency and meaning to integrated data, allowing senior, experienced and entry-level operators to identify, understand, react to and resolve abnormal situations, thus optimizing their operations. The new capabilities can also empower and train new operators, helping companies address another major issue: the retiring workforce.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 30, 2013 | Operations Management, Software
Earlier this week, I speculated on the future of software and Microsoft especially. Mobile technology and Microsoft’s total lack of ability to get it together is really hurting the company. Not that its enterprise products don’t still dominate.
Kyle Reissner, @Ryzner and a member of the Global Product Management team at GE Intelligent Platforms, wrote to ask me to check out a white paper he’d authored about Facebook for Industry. I was expecting interface. One thing I often note is how new people entering the industry are used to user interfaces that are much cleaner and more intuitive than what we’ve done in the past.
What Kyle really meant was manufacturing data. And how to make sense of all the manufacturing data. He asks, “How does Facebook make sense of all the data and make it simple for users on smartphones?”
Facebook has evolved over the past nine years from a simple list of people filtered by your connections to a massive collective of data, photos, videos, games all backed with complex social algorithms that transform the petabytes of data into information relevant to each user. Now, when you login on your phone, tablet or through your browser, you are served real-time social information in the form of data, photos and ads so relevant to you it’s sometimes scary.
Then he discusses a little bit of how-to:
Facebook’s genius is how the back end systems dynamically adapt to real-time situations with historical intelligence through a simple to use interface. They have basically reorganized the Internet in the backend while maintaining a simple user interface; making Facebook much more than a social network.
And then, what if…
If workers could log into a system via a mobile app with a user interface as
simple as Facebook’s fed by a backend that’s just as intelligent – that would not only unlock them from a stationary terminal, but they’d have real information relevant to them anytime anywhere.
Bringing this up a level, if only 1% of machines within the estimated 30,000 manufacturing sites around the globe were connected and actively sharing data elements – collectively the sum of those industrial Facebook’s would be 7500x the volume that Facebook handles today.
He has a point. Of course, this is what he sells. But so do other companies. Are you asking the right questions of your software rep? Are they offering to help you with this sort of analytics and visibility? Are you pushing them?
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 22, 2013 | Operations Management, Software
[Updated with corrected analyst information] Infor announced “Infor Business Intelligence (BI) 10x” last week. This new product is designed to modernize data processing and enrich manufacturing decision-making according to the press release.
Senior Product Manager Jan Gahde told me that Infor may not be widely recognized as a Business Intelligence supplier, but he noted that former Gartner analyst Howard Dresner, cited in his recent Wisdom of Crowds study says that Infor is actually ranked pretty highly.
The solution delivers advanced analytics and planning capabilities, self-service dashboards, and social collaboration for a more modern, mobile, and social experience. Core technologies include Infor ION and Infor Ming.le to create “an experience that surpasses the ordinary to maximize real-time visibility and cultivate business development.” The press release called it a “beautiful” user interface. When I challenged Gahde with that rather extreme word, he told me that Infor has a design team focused on creating these modern, beautiful interfaces.
The solution leverages Infor ION, a lightweight middleware, to connect with the Infor ION Business Vault to provide information in real-time, in-context data, and deliver more reliable reporting that is not impacted by operational business application upgrades.
Rocking out to the Beatles “Revolution”, Invensys software announced “The Industrial Software Revolution Begins Now.” About 1,000 people gathered at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas for the second Invensys conference in a little over a month. Last month it was the process solutions side of the company. This conference focuses on Wonderware, SimSci-Esscor and Avantis.
