Adroit Technologies and local Mitsubishi distributors, CBI Electric Low Voltage, jointly announced an initiative to develop a fully integrated PLC/SCADA solution for the southern African industrial automation market. The companies believe this partnership will add value to both themselves, their channel partners and the end users.
Adroit managing director Dave Wibberley says, “It horrifies me to see the same mistakes being made today that were made 20 years ago. We have been preaching standards for a long time and this offering is really going to see our partners and end users benefiting from a more structured approach. We are really excited that the market will have an alternative to large expensive solutions being touted by competitors and that we shall deliver high value and quality solutions that are easy to maintain.”
He notes that the key to a successful, high-quality automation solution lies in standards and structure. To this end the product, to be called MA Process Suite (MAPS), will be shipped with a well thought out set of graphical and PLC function block objects designed to meet most automation requirements.
The user builds a structure in which plant area, process area, unit area and equipment to be controlled are defined. All the tags, alarming, logging, graphical mimic pages and I/O addressing are then generated automatically. After generating the project all the user needs to do in the scada is add in the navigation and the static representation of the mimics. In the PLC the required process interlocks need to be added.
Steve Venter, executive manager of CBI Electric Industrial controls adds, “We are delighted with the partnership. I have worked with some of the largest players in the automation field and Adroit and its products combine well with the Mitsubishi range of PLCs. This has the potential to change the game as we know it today.”
The alliance has approached a number of end users, SIs and project houses and all indications are that the market is ready. Any interested early adopters should contact either Steve Venter at CBI or Dave Wibberley at Adroit to find out how they can participate in this exciting southern African initiative.
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