Friday, 21 June 2013

Software Suite maximizes business value with analytic capabilities & access to the Cloud

The new Proficy Monitoring & Analysis software suite, the industry’s first integrated solution for industrial big data management and analytics has been anounced by GE Intelligent Platforms. It allows companies to manage equipment and process data to maximize performance with advanced products that capture, store, contextualize and analyze data and presents actionable insights for fast and effective decision making. 

The suite is comprised of six integrated products: Proficy Historian, GE’s flagship data collection software; Proficy Historian Analysis for data mining and visualization; Proficy SmartSignal for predictive analytics for condition-based monitoring; and Proficy CSense to troubleshoot process problems, monitor process health and create close loop process optimization. Two additional products are new to the offering and include Proficy Historian HD that allows storage of massively large data sets in a Hadoop cluster, and Proficy Knowledge Center, a console that ties the solution together with process visibility, asset health assessment and process optimization.

GE’s Proficy Historian HD is the first solution to combine industrial data and analytics with elastic capacity creating a Big Data solution built on Hadoop; the first step toward GE’s vision for the Industrial Internet. The software facilitates advanced analytics on industrial big data to improve process performance, troubleshoot process problems, and predict and prevent asset failures. Built collaboratively with GE’s Software Center of Excellence, Historian HD enables users to bring together an entire set of historical time-series data while reducing data storage costs by as much as 85%. 

“GE manages 5 TB of new time-series data per day,” said Brian Courtney, General Manager of GE Intelligent Platforms’ Industrial Data Intelligence Software group. “Our experience in big data and analytics that maximize equipment and process performance mitigates the risk for other companies.

“We use the software ourselves in our own Monitoring & Diagnostics centers to manage trillions of dollars in asset value,” he continued. “Today, in the GE Industrial Performance and Reliabilty Center, GE engineers monitor thousands of mission critical assets for our customers to ensure uptime, asset reliability overall production throughput."

Another new part of the suite is Proficy Knowledge Center, a model-driven, browser-based visualization application. Tightly coupling an asset data model with historical time-series data, Proficy Knowledge Center supports unified views of process health and equipment health for increasing productivity and decision making. The solution builds on Proficy Historian to efficiently store and display immense amounts of time-series data. Results of data analyzed by Proficy CSense or Proficy SmartSignal are then visualized through the Knowledge Center in model context making it easy to navigate and understand.

The Proficy Monitoring & Analysis software suite can be used remotely to monitor one plant or all of a company’s global operations. As a result, it provides information to increase equipment availability and reduce unplanned downtime, improve yield and reduce variability, and reduce maintenance costs and inventory. The Proficy Monitoring & Analysis suite provides four essential capabilities: 

Improved data management: The platform can manage and aggregate all time-series data and process data for authorized personnel anywhere with access to a web browser. Tremendous volumes of real-time data can be collected, archived, and distributed at extremely high speeds and low storage costs—in the Cloud. More data over longer periods of time can allow for advanced analysis and greater insight into actual versus optimal equipment and process performance—leading to a competitive advantage. 

Improved asset health: Using advanced predictive analytics and diagnostics, companies can monitor all critical assets automatically and continuously, 24 hours/day. The software “learns” normal asset behavior and detects variances to provide early warnings of impending problems, with diagnoses of equipment and process failures and prioritizations based on severity. Early warning reduces catastrophic equipment failure and enables proactive versus costly reactive maintenance. 

Process optimization: The software also optimizes processes with advanced analytics that identify unknown correlations in process variables that can lead to sub-optimal performance. It allows for what-if analysis to find solutions that optimize processes—at the same time optimizing for asset health. Process optimization increases yield, while reducing variability. 

Data visualization: The suite features web-based reporting to deliver role- and asset-based information that unlocks the value of the data in context to the right person at the right time. 

“This Proficy software suite allows a company to move from reactive to proactive. It allows them to start small and scale to massive based on their needs. And, it allows them to leverage local systems and cloud solutions - all from the same product suite.” concluded Courtney.

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