This year's conference, held on 5 October, was the largest gathering of its type in South Africa that is hosted by a vendor of industrial automation and MES solutions. 114 delegates from 48 system integration companies, covering all sectors of the SA manufacturing and mining industries, registered for the conference. It addressed imminent changes and developments in software solutions as well as the business opportunities that are currently available to system integrators and their customers.
Today, Futuristix partners with 75 registered system integrators, including six ArchestrA-certified SIs, to bring turnkey process control and MES (manufacturing execution systems) solutions featuring the latest technology and approaches to the southern African manufacturing and mining communities.
"Locally, we have sustained an annual growth rate of 16% over the past four years and globally, Wonderware has had 14 consecutive quarters of double digit revenue growth," says Justin Tweedie, MD of Futuristix, sole SA distributor for the Wonderware range of production and performance measurement solutions and a member of the EOH group of companies. "This is in the main due to ArchestrA technology accelerating the performance of our customers and partners, who can implement projects faster, more reliably and more economically than was possible previously."
ArchestrA's rapid adoption by system integrators is a major contributor to the product doubling in sales between 2005 and 2006 to over 1000 'galaxies', with double that number predicted for 2007. Today, ArchestrA is hosted on 8500 computers with more than 4500 View Clients - statistics that have doubled every year for the last three years, during which time Invensys (Wonderware's holding company) invested $100 million of development capital into what has become the industry's most popular industrial automation and MES infrastructure.
The conference dwelt in depth on production and performance management including the component parts that contribute towards making P&PM a reality. Production management 'transforms business objectives into operational commands' while performance management 'understands the impact that operations have on the company's business.' "While the applications that enable this to happen are numerous, it is Wonderware's goal to rationalise them into easily-understandable groups that map to the business and operational needs of manufacturing and mining companies," says Tweedie. "End-users are not interested in this, that or the other module or three-letter acronym. They want to know how they are doing and what to do if things are not going well. It is only in this context that applications, which address contributing factors such as equipment performance, product genealogy and consistency as well as bidirectional links between business and shopfloor systems, among many others, make any sense. Today's successful system integrators have to look beyond their traditional landscape and into a future where they must advise end-users clearly, logically and in terms of their business needs."
South Africa's system integrators have gained a well-earned reputation in the Wonderware community worldwide for their professionalism in implementing some of the most challenging industrial automation and MES projects. They have consistently demonstrated their domain knowledge and technology skills vis-á-vis the world's best by repeatedly winning the annual and coveted Wonderware Open award for outstanding projects where elegant and cost-effective implementations won the day over confusion and complexity.
For more information contact Justin Tweedie, Futuristix, (a member of the EOH Group of Companies), 0861 WONDER (0861 966 337), [email protected] or [email protected]
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