The subject projects of this year’s scada review are each a worthy reflection of the effort put in by the respondent end-users, SIs and vendors. It is encouraging to see that even in these times of depressed business confidence there are world-class projects being engineered by South African systems integrators across a broad range of industrial sectors.
Drill down for gold
We remind readers that the value of scada reviews is not always about the capabilities of the scada product – it may be about how the project has been engineered or managed, an innovative system architecture or the adoption of certain standards. This year’s reviews contain insights into all of these and more.
In print we feature each vendor’s response, which we have edited to meet space constraints. In order to prevent such editing from keeping valuable insights out of the hands of readers, we have published the full-length questionnaire responses online. For readers’ convenience, we have provided a link to the full-length article at the end of each printed review.
Our subject projects
Highlights of Adroit’s submission on an off-grid water treatment plant include the end-user’s desire to provide potable water to the previously disadvantaged Boekenhouthoek community in Mpumalanga, based on the World Health Organization’s guidelines for basic needs. Since the application includes remote monitoring and control of the solar driven Aquastation system, the communication architecture needed to be extremely robust. A key feature is the fact that the PLC program is accessible via the GSM network, so there is no need to drive to site to make a change if it is required.
Wonderware’s subject project involved data collection from two remotely located wind farms in the Eastern Cape. The brief was to track the performance of the two wind farms and report this data to end-user Cennergi’s head office in Centurion. A major requirement was that the system had to be based on configuration rather than customisation in order to meet any new reporting and/or expansion requirements without the need for additional software development. This pointed the way to an ’out-of-the-box’ solution.
The subject of Schneider’s submission is a food and beverage application in KwaZulu-Natal. The application is an industrial control, scada and reporting system for a wheat mill that produces various types of baking flour. The system consists of redundant scada servers and clients connected to multiple PLCs, remote I/O stations and 500+ variable speed drives on an industrial Ethernet network. Application of power metering and variable speed drives to monitor, control and optimise energy usage was one of the main project goals.
Thank you
On behalf of our readers, we thank the end-users, SIs and vendors for their efforts in comprehensively completing our 2016 scada questionnaire, for sharing their expertise and experience, and continuing to expand the knowledge base of the C&I industry in South and southern Africa.
Notes:
1. The order of appearance of scada reviews is the order in which they were received by SA Instrumentation and Control.
2. Some reviewer responses have been edited due to space and comprehension considerations.
3. A ‘No’ or ‘N/A’ response to a question in the project-specific responses does not necessarily mean that the scada system lacks that feature; only that the feature was not implemented in, or not applicable to, the subject project.
4. Where a respondent has not answered a question or has answered off topic that response has been omitted.
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