Invensys Operations Management Pushes Integrated Enterprise Control

Nov. 3, 2010
During the recent OpsManage’10 user conference, IOM executives emphasized the value provided by the company’s InFusion Enterprise Control System (ECS) framework, while adding new ECS components to the mix.

When London-based Invensys plc last year merged four far-flung units to form Invensys Operations Management (IOM, www.iom.invensys.com), based in Plano, Texas, some industry watchers wondered whether the reorganized automation solutions supplier could effectively coalesce. But at the OpsManage’10 user conference, Oct. 18-22 in Orlando, IOM executives assured a keynote audience totaling more than 1,100 that the division is well on its way to achieving its goals. “In a little over a year, we’ve brought together nine first-class brands into one company with solutions that drive value for customers,” declared Steve Blair, IOM North America president, during an Oct. 19 keynote address.

The company touts its integrated, enterprise control system (ECS) concept as a way that manufacturing companies can effectively extend real-time decision support across all levels of the enterprise to achieve operational excellence. And IOM President and Chief Executive Officer Sudipta Bhattacharya said during his keynote presentation that the company already has most of the pieces in place to make the ECS vision a reality. “How well we knit those pieces together and provide them to our customers, and how we do it better than our competition, that is our journey,” he said.

Gap closing

The foundation of an enterprise control system is an integration framework that can tie together many different kinds of applications, said Bhattacharya. This includes IOM systems and products, as well as those from third parties. The company’s InFusion ECS is all about closing the “control gap” between strategy and execution to enable real-time adaptation, Bhattacharya said. “Once we have the integration framework, then we can tie the applications together. I can connect the plant floor to the information that is coming from the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, and therefore, I have the ability to contextualize information,” he explained.

Invensys added one important piece to the concept last April, with the acquisition of Skelta Software, a Bangalore, India-based business process management (BPM) company. And at OpsManage’10, the company unveiled ArchestrA Workflow, which integrates the Skelta BPM.Net technology with IOM’s ArchestrA System Platform to provide core workflow and collaboration functionality.

ArchestrA Workflow will “basically allow our customers to create holistic processes that can run all the way from the plant floor to the top floor,” according to Sanjay Shah, Invensys Skelta managing director. “Right before OpsManage, we did a beta release, and we are slated to release our first line of products in January of 2011,” Shah told Automation World. The company is currently working with 25 different customers that are likely to use the technology after its first release, Shah said.

One good example of the InFusion ECS concept in action came in an Integrated Process Industry Application being demonstrated on the OpsManage Expo floor. It showed how users can visualize different systems and data sources in one view, using a variety of IOM products and technologies. The demonstration showed an integrated, high-fidelity plant simulation of a refinery vacuum tower using SimSci-Esscor Dynsim. The refinery control system strategy was running on a Foxboro I/A Series distributed control system.

The demo also included an Avantis enterprise asset management application and integrated asset condition monitoring, while Wonderware’s mobile IntelaTrac was being used by maintenance personnel to guide maintenance procedures. All of these InFusion ECS components were integrated via the ArchestrA System Platform and visualized using Wonderware InTouch human-machine interface (HMI) technology, with workflows orchestrated by the ArchestrA Workflow extension.

New product highlights

IOM used OpsManage’10 to unveil a range of other new products, which the company referred to as InFusion ECS components. Some of the highlights included:

Foxboro Programmable Automation Controller (PAC) System. As the first full-blown PAC from Invensys, the system can handle up to 3,000 input/output (I/O) and takes IOM into a new market arena of hybrid applications. Designed for integration with Wonderware System Platform and use of ArchestrA technology, the Foxboro PAC is well suited for delivering control, alarm management, historian Web reporting and batch functionality for applications in industries including food and beverage, glass, metals, minerals, mining, life sciences, plastics, and water and wastewater, the company said.

SmartGlance. To deliver key plant data to mobile workers, SmartGlance is a subscription service provided as a software-as-a-service, or cloud-based, application. The app pushes manufacturing data reports from Wonderware Historian to popular smart phones, such as Apple iPhone, Apple iPad and Blackberry 8000 and 9000 Series phones. Sarla Analytics (www.sarla.com), an IOM ecosystem partner with U.S. offices in Barrington, R.I., is providing the smart phone app and operating the secure cloud server. SmartGlance is in beta test with several customers now, and will be launched for use by all customers before yearend, said Bimal Mehta, IOM director, industry application management.

Triconex General Purpose System. Designed to offer a lower-cost entry point into the Triconex Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) safety system product line, the Triconex General Purpose System is a TUV-certified safety integrity level 2 (SIL2) safety instrumented system platform. The “TriGP” uses the same basic TriStation 1131 engineering environment, and supports the same peer-to-peer communications as other systems in the family, so that it can co-exist with current Tricon and Trident SIL3 offerings. The Triconex General Purpose System fulfills requirements for applications such as emergency shutdown, fire and gas protection, and burner management, according to IOM.

Eurotherm nanodac. Offering recording and control in a single, compact package, the nanodac local historian is a ¼-inch DIN panel mount unit that provides four high-accuracy universal inputs for data recording and PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control. It has the ability to operate as an 18-channel data logger/local historian, and features 50 megabytes of on-board flash memory for recording and provision of store-and-forward. The unit is enhanced with a full-color ¼-inch VGA 320-by-240 pixel display that provides a simple, Windows-like user interface. The nanodac provides direct connectivity to the Enterprise Control System, IOM said.

Foxboro I/A Series 100 Series I/O Upgrade. Designed to ease the pain and cost associated with system migration, the Foxboro I/A Series 100 Series I/O Upgrade is a mechanism to convert existing 100 Series I/O to the new 200 Series I/O by using 200 Series mounting hardware and connector adapters with the existing 100 Series nose cones and field wiring. The 100 Series Upgrade solution includes replacing the existing 100 Series rack with a new Fieldbus Module (FBM) mounting structure, replacing the 100 Series FBM and termination assembly adapter (TAA). The existing nosecone attaches directly to the TAA and the field wiring is not touched. Retaining all field wiring attached to the current termination connectors avoids large investment in loop checkout during the migration program, IOM said.

For more coverage of OpsManage’10, including audio podcasts, video demonstrations and interviews, please visit www.automationworld.com/opsmanage2010. Invensys Operations Managementwww.iom.invensys.comSarla Analytics www.sarla.com

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