The ability to peer into the workings at any of a company’s facilities from afar and view operating data whenever you need it has tremendous value. Just ask IMO Autopflege GmbH, a European car-wash operator based in Muelheim, Germany. Even though its automated facilities offer services rather than products, the company collects and digests the same type of information that manufacturers use to deliver their products faster, better and cheaper. Ready access to such data allows the car-wash operator to rapidly adjust its prices to changing local conditions and to improve service and cut costs by diagnosing and correcting problems remotely.

The central office did not always have immediate access to such data, however. Because the company performs 13 million washes every year at the 285 locations it has in Germany alone, the old manual method of tracking the activity there and at the hundreds of other locations throughout Europe was a major undertaking. Manual entries into accounting software were slow and cumbersome. For this reason, data were dated and limited. The company could not exploit all of the information passing through the 96 digital input ports and 128 analog output ports on each of the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) running its washing lines.

To make use of that data, IMO needed an easier way for tapping into the gold mines of information created as attendants take orders and the PLCs regulate conveyor speed, switch brushes on and off, and coordinate the other activities along the lines that they supervise. So as an increasing number of manufacturers have done for production lines, IMO has turned to Internet technology to link its facilities to its central office and to automate the collecting and monitoring of operating data. In the initial phase, it connected 120 of its facilities to a central personal computer operating on Microsoft Windows NT at headquarters and began exchanging data through software interfaces called Web Services.

These Web Services are communications tools that software developers embed in their software to run behind the scenes and be transparent to users. They are a kind of component-based software technology that packages programmable application logic into a “black box” that any software using it can access through Internet protocols, rather than specific object-model protocols. Software developers using Web Services organize the logic and the data that a Web Service uses around the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and extensible markup language (XML).

“As a vendor, we chose to leverage XML to make our products work together because it is a quicker way to bring products to market,” says Roy Kok, director of HMI/SCADA at GE Fanuc Automation Inc., in Charlottesville, Va., an affiliate of GE Industrial Systems. “It’s a standard that we can apply throughout all of our products, instead of having to invent one of our own.” The result is that GE Fanuc, as well as those of its competitors that also use the technology, can integrate its products more thoroughly and faster.

Get it, use it

Even though users of software do not apply Web Services directly, they are finding Web Services to be of enormous value. As manufacturers installed automation and software in their facilities over the last few decades, they learned that their PLCs, human-machine interfaces (HMIs), and PCs contain tremendous amounts of information that could be valuable—if only they could access it quickly without a lot of effort and expense. Web Services solve this problem, helping them to collect and package for use the wealth of information that would otherwise sit in these disparate databases. They reach into these databases, pick out the relevant information, and display it automatically in a report that employees can read and understand.

In IMO’s case, the Web Services are built into Cimplicity HMI, the monitoring and control element in the Proficy Intelligent Productions Solutions family of applications from GE Fanuc. Through the Web Services running behind the scenes, the software reaches into each PLC every night to retrieve the number of cars washed on the line it supervises, the wash programs selected, and 500 pieces of operating data collected at various points of the line. Analysts at the head office then pore over the statistics the next day and glean useful information about the business and the equipment.

One fruit of the Web Services in the Cimplicity HMI is a Trend Control tool based on ActiveX technology. This tool collects the appropriate operating data and business statistics for analysis and evaluation and displays them in “point-and-click” screens for evaluation and optimization. ...