June 2019System Integration & Control Systems Design
The subject projects of this year’s Scada Review are 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 economic stagnation and uncertainty there are world-class projects being engineered by South African companies across a range of industrial sectors.
Insight in the detail
We remind readers that the value of the reviews is not always about the capabilities of the scada product – it may be about how the project has been engineered or managed, innovative system architecture or the adoption of certain standards. This year’s reviews contain details of 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 information from 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 Schneider Electric’s submission included an upgrade to an existing Citect system at Sasol Synfuels in Secunda. The main drivers for the upgrade were to overcome obsolescence, establish engineering standards and full compliance with the abnormal situational management (ASM) standard.
The end user was particularly impressed with the comprehensive situational awareness library, better alarm management capability, support structure and upgrade path. Also, operators now have the ability to build their own trends to aid real-time decision making.
Adroit Technologies’ project used IoT-enabled devices to monitor assets and infrastructure for a leading water utility. This Smart City project was implemented in parallel with an existing Adroit SCADA system, which monitors and controls the area’s water systems and services.
This project was undertaken with a view to mitigating risk and to take advantage of new digital technologies to enable better service delivery to consumers. The end user was particularly impressed with the Adroit Smart UI and the GIS interface. Also, Adroit Performance Anywhere gives users access to the data in the agent server via an easily configurable interface utilising predefined objects. This can then be viewed in any web-enabled device’s browser window.
Thank you
On behalf of our readers, we thank the end-users, SIs and vendors for their efforts in comprehensively completing our 2018 scada questionnaire, for sharing their expertise and experience, and continuing to expand the knowledge base of the C&I industry in South Africa.
Notes:
1. The order of appearance of 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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