Digitalising manufacturing operations.

New software solution helps manufacturers digitalise and gain insights from data to increase efficiency

Batch Historian, from Honewell, is a software digitalization solution designed to provide manufacturers with contextualized data history for reporting and analytics, leading to more efficient and cost-effective operations. The digitalization of manufacturing operations supports the company's alignment of its portfolio to the automation megatrend.

Manufacturers often encounter complications analyzing data with a lack of batch visualization, which makes it difficult to expand data usage to advanced applications. With Honeywell Batch Historian, manufacturers can now directly capture data with context from batch engines without complex configuration. The new solution leverages simple drag-and-drop tile configuration, eliminating the need for advanced programming skillsets or detailed historian database knowledge to develop reports.

“Honeywell’s full suite of digital manufacturing technologies will help manufacturers improve product quality, regulatory compliance and overall efficiency in order to drive business outcomes,” said Shawn Opatka, Vice President and General Manager of Life Sciences at Honeywell Process Solutions. “Our approach is modular and flexible, helping companies begin their digitalization journey by adopting new technologies as they need them.”

Honeywell Batch Historian supports several industries including specialty chemicals, life sciences, food & beverage, pulp & paper, and mining, materials, and metals (MMM). By leveraging the software, manufacturers can enhance process efficiency and simplify troubleshooting, ultimately improving operational outcomes. The solution’s configuration for batch reporting simplifies the reporting and data analysis process, making it easier for operators to comply with strict industry reporting regulations.

By enabling manufacturers to efficiently capture, analyze, and utilize manufacturing data, this software empowers users to make informed decisions, optimize processes, and drive continuous facility improvement. The software is a standalone application that can be delivered as a module on the Manufacturing Excellence Platform (MXP), or made available as a standard part of every Experion Batch system.

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@honeywell @HWusers #Pauto #LifeSciences.

Accelerating industrial analytics.

Seeq Corporation has just announced a new offering on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate access to manufacturing data for enabling AWS analytics on industrial data. The Seeq AWS Glue integration for Enterprise Historians, available on AWS Marketplace, simplifies industrial data discovery and migration to the AWS cloud using Seeq’s proven historian data access architecture.

Seeq also announced the completion of its SOC2 Type 1 certification. SOC 2 compliance is a critical consideration for companies evaluating SaaS applications to ensure vendors have the appropriate controls to protect data handled on their systems.

“Timely, ad hoc access to operational data is essential to advancing Industry 4.0 use cases through centralized data science and machine learning efforts, yet providing this functionality continues to vex many organizations,” says Jonathan Lang, IDC Research. “Solutions which rapidly liberate this data will accelerate and expand the insights and benefits of manufacturing data science initiatives.”

Seeq enables engineers and scientists in process manufacturing organizations to rapidly analyze, predict, collaborate, and share insights to improve production and business outcomes. Seeq customers include companies in the oil and gas, pharmaceutical, chemical, energy, mining, food and beverage, and other process industries.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. The integration of Seeq and AWS Glue creates a secure and virtualized connection to on premise historian databases, manages data discoverability, and enables data science teams to access this data for machine learning in AWS. The result is simplified access to machine data, process data, and contextual data stored in historian databases—including the OSIsoft PI system, OSIsoft PI Asset Framework (AF), AspenTech IP21—along with other data historians.

Seeq also announced the completion of a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation, performed by Tevora, an independent accounting firm which conducts audits of company practices and procedures related to customer data security. SOC 2 compliance is an important consideration for companies evaluating SaaS applications to ensure vendors have the appropriate controls to protect data handled on their systems. This audit affirms Seeq’s procedures, policies, and operations meet the SOC 2 standards relative to Security Trust Services Principle and Criteria including customer data protection, cybersecurity, and software management.

“Analytics software for manufacturing customers is an area long overdue for innovation,” says Megan Buntain, Director of Cloud Partnerships at Seeq. “By choosing Seeq SaaS to democratize innovations in big data, machine learning, and computer science, industrial organizations can easily access new capabilities to improve production and business success.”

@SeeqCorporation @awscloud #PAuto #AWS #Cloud

Report generation.

Ocean Data Systems (ODS) has  announced that Dream Report is now a reference product in the Rockwell Automation Encompass™ Program.

ODS is now an Encompass Product Partner and Dream Report is a reference product in the program under the category of “Software Product – Report Generation”.  Dream Report currently supports Rockwell Automation software products through both proprietary and industry standard interfaces.  These interfaces include; a driver for the legacy RSView® History Data, OPC DA for real-time connectivity, OPC HDA for history data connectivity, and an OSI PI drivers for history data.  

Additional developments are underway to deliver even tighter integration. Through Encompass Product Partners, customers can quickly locate complementary products, now including Dream Report, that best solve application challenges. These products are critical components or connectivity solutions that extend and enhance Rockwell Automation installations.  

“It is an honor to become a member of the Encompass Program,” explained Alex Mazal, President of Ocean Data Systems.  “We will be developing direct relationships with Rockwell Automation sales channels and will be supporting them in their use of Dream Report with Rockwell Automation products.”

“Dream Report is a comprehensive out-of-the-box package that is a great fit for FactoryTalk View® Site Edition applications that require reporting,” says Sharon M. Billi-Duran, Product Manager, Visualization Software at Rockwell Automation.  “We look forward to seeing Dream Report as an additional reporting option for our customers, in all vertical markets.”

@ROKAutomation #PAuto @OceanDataSys 

Automated reporting & data analysis software update.

Ocean Data Systems (ODS), has announced that Dream Report version 4.81 is posted and available for download.

Version 4.81, technically a maintenance release, is available to all 4.8 customers. Along with a broad array of Customer Software Change Requests (SCRs), this release delivers on a theme of Productivity. As customer applications grow and evolve, users benefit from search and replace tools, and export and import functions to replicate reports and dashboards across assets and sites. This release delivers on both fronts with significant enhancements to Search and Replace, and the addition of Exports and Imports to many areas of Dream Report configuration. Other new features include a “Difference” statistic, and enhanced connectivity to Wonderware Online InSight and Citect SCADA, by Schneider Electric.

“In our experience, Dream Report is typically justified through the creation of a half dozen or so reports,” explained Roy Kok, VP Sales and Marketing for Ocean Data Systems. “As our customers continue to leverage the many data sources that Dream Report can support, across similar assets or many sites, we are seeing applications with dozens, and even hundreds of reports in a single Dream Report installation. The payback of Dream Report, even in the smallest of applications is in weeks or months. In larger applications, Dream Report becomes an indispensable tool for compliance, continuous improvement, and data analysis and troubleshooting, for any organization and all applications.”

@OceanDataSys  #PAuto 

Co-operation aids automated reporting and corporate dashboards for plants.

Schneider Electric™ will be delivering Dream Report™ for CitectHistorian™ as a branded solution for plant reporting.

Working closely with Schneider Electric, Ocean Data Systems has delivered Dream Report for the upcoming version of the best-in-class, real-time plant historian software, Citect Historian 2016 (v4.60). This release includes both new and improved drivers for CitectHistorian, and will be licensed, sold, delivered and supported by Schneider Electric and its subsidiaries, globally.

“We have looked at the success of Dream Report in our other divisions and it is clear that this is an excellent product that would add significant value to every CitectHistorian installation,” explained Con Karantziounis, CitectHistorian Product Manager at Schneider Electric. “We are cementing our efforts towards promoting simplification and ease-of-use, with a user-friendly and programming-free automated reporting and data analysis solution, and we encourage all our CitectHistorian customers to consider Dream Report as an extension to their systems.” 

Availability is planned for next month (March 2016).

“We are very proud to have Schneider Electric choose Dream Report as the reporting and analysis solution for CitectHistorian” says Alex Mazal, President of Ocean Data Systems. “This opens a significant new market for Dream Report, one that was poorly served with generic business tools in the past. Schneider Electric already offers Dream Report through its WonderwareTM, IndusoftTM, and EurothermTM channels and it makes perfect sense that Dream Report should also become the default solution for their CitectHistorian customers.”

@OceanDataSys #PAuto @SchneiderElec

Tops in Europe!

Red Herring has recognised Europe’s leading private companies and celebrating their innovations and technologies across their respective industries as its Top 100 award winners were announced. 

The Top 100 Europe list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring’s editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work. Red Herring selects companies that show the most potential for disruption and growth. This year's Top 100 Europe 2013 list featured the Irish and international provider of process optimisation solutions, Automsoft. (Seven other Irish companies featured in other technologies such as mobile & internet communications.)

Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring said “We looked at hundreds and hundreds of candidates from all across the continent, and after much thought and debate, narrowed the list down to the Top 100 Winners. Each year, the competition gets tougher but we believe Automsoft demonstrates the vision, drive and innovation that define a Red Herring winner.”

Paraic O’Toole, Automsoft’s CEO said “It’s a great honour to be selected as one of Red Herring’s Top 100 Tech companies in Europe for 2013. It is a testament to the innovation and creativity of our team over the last number of years, as well as our many customers around the world who have implemented our software and are deriving tangible benefits for their business from our software.”

Automsoft is a software company that has developed revolutionary technology for managing time-series data – collection, storage and web-based analytics. Time series data is generated by sensor networks, control systems, metering systems across industries such as smart grid, process manufacturing, micro-grid, oil and gas and many others. Time-series data management is the last big challenge in Big Data – how to collect, store and analyze massive volumes of the data generated by the increasing network of devices generating this type of data. Typically, in database technology, the greater the volume of data in the database, the slower the performance. This has been particularly true for time series data. Automsoft’s revolutionary technology has, for the first time, broken the link between database volume and performance so that all of the data can be analysed without a performance impact. It is the result of many years of research, is live in thousands of sites around the world and is now starting to be applied in the smart grid and cleantech world.

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technological innovation, management quality, overall business strategy and market penetration. This assessment was complemented by a review of the track records and standings of similar companies in the same verticals, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Europe.

Industrial big data problems solved!

Proficy® Historian 5.0 and Proficy Historian Analysis from GE Intelligent Platforms, is a combined solution that enables improved operational productivity by providing a reliable, secure, high speed, scalable platform for aggregating Industrial Big Data. The solution allows companies to contextualize, analyze and visualize huge amounts of data and act on it quickly to improve their operations.

Robust Operations Data Management is a capability and a requirement that impacts all industries where often IT and technology systems that have evolved over time cannot support strategic growth initiatives. The new Proficy Historian 5.0, combined with Proficy Historian Analysis, provides enhanced features that facilitate a conversation between IT and Senior Management because the data provides an Enterprise Operations Intelligence Platform that accelerates complete context in the decision making process.

In addition, Historian 5.0 allows for multiple data stores so companies can separate regulatory data from process data for easy reporting for differing requirements. Data stores are a powerful new concept in Time Series data management allowing for the partitioning and fit-for-purpose optimization of Proficy Historian. Never before have companies had so much control over how their archiver performs, how data gets managed, and how system resources are allocated to reduce overall cost of ownership, improve performance, and enable compliance.

“Industrial Big Data is a reality in business today,” said Brian Courtney, General Manager Industrial Data Intelligence Software for GE Intelligent Platforms. “The massive growth in data generated by operations means that more and more data must be retained for analysis and compliance. There is a clear need for improved governance and security as well as the need to contain lifecycle costs of data management.”

Proficy software platform provides a highly scalable data management platform that empowers enterprises to deliver on business objectives today and into the future. Its proven lower total cost of ownership and quicker time to value allow companies to quickly make sense of data. The solution features built-in data collection, high data compression, and control and business system independence which translate to reduced customization.

“GE is uniquely positioned to provide a solution of this scale,” said Jim Walsh, Software Vice President for GE Intelligent Platforms. “We are using our Historian as a foundation for our own solutions in huge business situations that monitor thousands of assets around the world in critical infrastructure facilities. We are committed to invest and innovate in software as a core competency of the company as we scale our solutions to meet the needs of our customers.”

At GE Energy’s Monitoring & Diagnostics Centers, Proficy Historian has reduced the data footprint of monitoring more than 1500 turbines in 60 countries from 50 terabytes to 10. Year-over-year fleet analysis requiring access to massive time series data sets, which previously took days to complete, can now be completed in minutes. In addition, the company has saved millions of dollars by doing predictive analysis on the turbines facilitating planned downtime for repairs and maintenance. And, they have increased their customer satisfaction twofold.

Adding the new Proficy Historian Analysis to the platform provides web-based visualization of trend data, reporting, search capability and collaboration enabled by the Industrial Internet. This analysis tool gives process engineers a good view into Historian data for actionable information. They can use the tool to drag and drop Historian tags into trend analysis to create reports on the fly facilitated by Internet access, which also allows troubleshooting from any location. Users can also easily pull data and graphics into a Microsoft® Word-like environment to create professional reports.

Proficy Historian 5.0 features more than 15 million tags on a single server with upwards of 3,000 client/collector connections and is able to archive 256GB with microsecond sampling. Its advanced data management capabilities feature tiered data management strategies using server-to-server capability that are designed to help companies comply with the Food & Drug Administration’s 21CFR Part 11 and other regulatory requirements. And, as part of GE’s Proficy Software platform, it provides best-in-class HMI presentation and Workflow capabilities as well as industry-leading analytics.

“Ultimately, more data means better analytics,” concluded Courtney. “Proficy Historian is an Industrial Big Data management platform that scales both horizontally for any data volume and variety, and vertically for any velocity. This type of advanced Historian technology can help turn data and information into an asset and a competitive differentiator.”

Accelerating access to “Big Data” across the enterprise!

GE Intelligent Platforms has launched its latest software product, Proficy® Historian 4.5. 

This Enterprise Historian solution, from GE Intelligent Platforms, collects, aggregates and organizes the massive amount of data that exists across organizations enabling effective decision-making and tight governance. It is easily integrated into any company’s enterprise systems portfolio through an open, flexible architecture that easily leverages existing investments.

The new Proficy Historian 4.5 adds support of more than 15 million tags, a capability unmatched in the industry. This feature allows users to aggregate and disseminate information across the enterprise through a secure and scalable Historian platform.

“Proficy Historian 4.5 empowers enterprises to deliver on business objectives today and in the future,” said Brian Courtney, General Manager Operations Data Management for GE Intelligent Platforms. “This platform is the enabling pillar for companies to realize value for other corporate initiatives such as Operational Excellence.”

At GE Energy’s Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) Center in Atlanta, where they use Proficy to monitor more than 1,000 gas turbine assets across the globe, they wanted to be sure their architecture and hardware/software technologies would scale to meet both their business growth projections but also accommodate exponential increase in data. The team commissioned GE’s Global Research Center to conduct an analysis of Big Data technologies on massive time-series process data which are at the heart of GE Energy’s M&D applications. 

“GE is getting ahead of the issue, taking a leading position on Big Data as so many of our businesses generate and depend on effective management of data across the enterprise,” said Bill Ruh, GE Vice President and leader of the company’s software inititiaves. “The massive growth in data generated by operations is fueling the need to retain more and more data for analysis and compliance. Open architectures and interoperability across business systems is necessary to accelerate and provide complete context for business decisions.”

In the study, conducted by the GE Global Research Center in August 2011, Proficy Historian was shown to excel against relational and unstructured databases for time series data. Typical columnar or relational databases are not well suited for handling time series process data queries at this scale and some of the newer technologies are too immature at this point for real production/operations environments, according to the study. 

“For process data, Proficy Historian is a complete solution for massive data management systems,” said Courtney. “The Historian used in the study was our out-of-the-box, standard Proficy Historian, an easy-to-use and fast-to-implement solution. We didn’t need to do any custom programming to achieve these results. The study validated our belief that this new release of Historian can solve Big Data customer problems today, without requiring extensive infrastructure changes or customization.”

Proficy Historian 4.5 is the latest example of how GE’s $4 billion-a-year software and solutions services businesses are helping customers improve productivity.

Production data on iPad

Industrial Thinking have released a new version of their Counterpoint Trending package on the iPad/iPhone.

Counterpoint Trend Mobile now adds Real-time remote access to your Production data directly on your iPad as well as iPhone . This new version offers significant performance benefits too for those times when your data connection speed is less than ideal. The new version has just become available on the AppStore and is free to download and try .

The intuitive user interface enables you to Browse, Search and Trend tags from any of your configured Data Historian(s).

Supported Data Historian interfaces include most of the Industry Standard Historians, such as AspenTech Infoplus.21, OSI Pi, OPC DA and HDA, Honeywell PHD and VSystem.

Iconics at #ISAwk 2010

Game Changing Software Solutions for Plant Operations
64-bit HMI/SCADA and Plant Historian Suites Level the Playing Field
Iconics announced a team of 64-bit automation suites that are truly game changers for industrial automation. GENESIS64™ and Hyper Historian™ are gaining market share and changing the way that plants operate.

Newly released GENESIS64 V10.5 is designed from the ground up to utilise OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and 64-bit multi-core hardware platforms. The GENESIS64 suite includes several modular solutions that simplify connectivity from the plant floor to corporate business systems. Compatible with Microsoft Windows® 7 and certified for Windows Server® 2008, it allows plant operators, IT professionals and facility managers to integrate real-time manufacturing and business information into a common, Web-enabled visualization dashboard. The GENESIS64 suite is comprised of GraphWorX™64, TrendWorX™64, AlarmWorX™64, EarthWorX™ and the Workbench Web-based development, deployment and operations products.

The new Hyper Historian V10.5 is an extremely high speed, reliable and robust industrial data historian solution. It takes full advantage of the latest 64-bit .NET-based computing technologies and numerous performance features. Hyper Historian is certified for Windows Server 2008, compatible with the Windows 7 operating system and leverages the new OPC Unified Architecture Standard.
“GENESIS64 and Hyper Historian are the first 64-bit OPC UA compliant product suites on a Microsoft platform that are robust, scalable, high-performance and enterprise-wide for industrial automation applications,” said Russ Agrusa, President and CEO of ICONICS speaking at the Automation Week conference. “Both products have been designed to handle the most mission critical applications that demand the highest level of availability and deliver unparalleled performance with very efficient use of computing resources.”
“The latest releases from ICONICS demonstrate their commitment to developing and delivering the highest quality products based on the OPC technology,” said Tom Burke, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation.

Hyper Historian delivers unparalleled performance with very efficient use of computer resources. This is the first plant historian to be compatible with Microsoft Windows® 7 and certified for Microsoft Windows Server 2008® and includes tight integration with SQL Server® 2008. This technology makes the Hyper Historian from ICONICS, the best-in-class, real-time plant historian for any Microsoft 64-bit operating system.

“Manufacturers are deploying the latest Microsoft operating systems and technologies in part to address their requirements for 3D visualization and data archiving of both their manufacturing and business processes”, according to Craig Resnick, Research Director at ARC Advisory Group. “Windows 7, running on computers with new 64-bit processors, and leveraging features such as Multi-touch and Silverlight, will further enhance the real-time visualization and data archiving capabilities of software tools such as ICONICS’ GENESIS64 and Hyper Historian.”

Support for Windows Phone 7
MobileHMI to Support Microsoft’s New Windows Phone 7 for Mobile Applications

MobileHMI software solution from Iconics will support the soon to be released Microsoft Windows Phone 7 platform.

MobileHMI from ICONICS delivers real-time rich visualization and KPI alerts directly to wireless devices. With support for over 400 wireless devices MobileHMI is the most versatile software platform for staying in touch with your building and manufacturing operations. Now with the added support for Microsoft Windows Phone 7, the MobileHMI application can deliver real-time alerts, trends, and events.

“ICONICS was recently awarded the Microsoft Windows 7 Partner of the Year Award at the 2010 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference,” said Melissa Topp, Product Marketing Manager at ICONICS. “Adding support for Windows Phone 7 to our MobileHMI product offering is part of our strategy to deliver solutions that leverage the latest Microsoft platforms.”

The following key Windows Phone 7 features will be supported by MobileHMI:

• Support for Silverlight
• Metro UI look and feel• Real-time visualization
• Push notifications for alarms and events
• MultiTouch support
• Application bar integration
• Supports “Tombstoning” - suspends the application when the user navigates away
• Panorama and pivot controls for intuitive navigation
• Automatic portrait and landscape mode

“Mobility solutions are one of the fastest growing areas of demand for manufacturers and processors,” according to Craig Resnick, Research Director at ARC Advisory Group. “Windows Phone 7 support for MobileHMI is designed to help address that demand, providing a tool that can increase productivity while maintaining connectivity of mobile devices. This tool is another example of the close relationship between Microsoft and ICONICS, which leads to a continued stream of products that leverage the latest Microsoft products and technologies”.


AlarmWorX64 Multimedia
Multimedia OPC Alarm Management Software for 32 and 64-bit Servers

Iconics also announced the release of AlarmWorX™64 Multimedia, an OPC alarm management software solution for 32 and 64-bit servers. With 11 configurable robust agents, AlarmWorX64 MMX is the most comprehensive OPC alarm management solution in the marketplace.
The new AlarmWorX64 MMX is an optional enhancement to the award winning GENESIS64™ HMI/SCADA suite and is designed to interface to any OPC Alarm and Event compliant server. AlarmWorX64 MMX is easily and conveniently configurable using standard internet browsers.

“AlarmWorX64 MMX is based on ICONICS ‘OPC to the Core’ standard,” said Russ Agrusa, President and CEO of ICONICS. “AlarmWorX64 MMX delivers specific alerts and messages to anyone, anytime, anywhere quickly and immediately via numerous media services including: voice, telephone, e-mail, instant messenger and more.”

The following Agents are offered with AlarmWorX64 MMX:

• Telephony Agent: Calls a defined number & gives a message with options to respond.
• Pager Agent: Delivers alarms to numeric, alphanumeric and two-way pagers.
• Video Agent: Plays a pre-recorded video or a video captured at the time of an alarm.
• E-mail Agent: Receive and acknowledge alarms using text and e-mail messages.
• Skype Messaging Agent: Delivers instant text messages to any Skype™ account.
• Marquee Agent: Sends alarm & event messages to software and hardware marquees.
• Sound / Text-to-Speech Agent: Plays pre-recorded sound bites on an alarm condition.
• Fax Agent: Sends alarm notifications via fax.
• Popup Agent: Launches any application to provide alarm massages.
• Task Tray Agent: Delivers a pop-up message to the Windows taskbar notification area.
• Custom Agent: Allows users to create their own Multimedia agent.

“With the increased adoption of 64-bit runtime platforms and software on the plant floor, the demand for 64-bit applications is on the rise as plant operations seek to best maximize the value and KPI’s of production,” according to Craig Resnick, Research Director at ARC Advisory Group. “ICONICS latest 64-bit software offering, AlarmWorX64 Multimedia, is a solution that leverages the benefits of a true 64-bit software application and helps its customer address their demand for higher performance.”