More than 1400 manufacturing industry professionals registered for the second round of Futuristix-Wonderware national breakfast road shows for 2002. The seminars were held at 15 venues countrywide and the attendance figures were the highest they have ever been.
"The increasing number of delegates shows that we are hitting the nail on the head," says Futuristix-Wonderware MD, Mike le Plastrier. "They are interested in cost-effective solutions that are evolving, open and that lend themselves to enterprise-wide integration. They are also interested in solutions with a proven track record of practical application."
The live presentations focused on showing the ease of implementation and obvious financial and operational benefits to be derived from the automation of three key application areas: plant-wide application integration, the measurement of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and manufacturing intelligence.
The ArchestrA framework is Wonderware's most significant technology release in the past decade and its makers believe that it is destined to redefine the way industrial automation professionals will think of process control in the future. ArchestrA allows all applications to work together in harmony while enabling engineers to use standardised and user-defined application objects (eg, valves, tanks, furnaces, etc.) across a multitude of projects and to distribute these objects between a variety of computing platforms.
"Taken together, the new features of ArchestrA allow companies in all industries to stay competitive in an Internet time warp, in which product life cycles are growing ever shorter and end-user customers are demanding custom products that can be brought to market more quickly," says le Plastrier. "This framework will allow application developers to shorten their product development cycles, to manage continuous improvements throughout a project's life cycle and to truly make products evolutionary over a lifetime."
The virtual impossibility of manually determining overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and the ease with which this can be done with Wonderware's down time analyst was graphically demonstrated. "The accurate, realtime identification of the causes for inadequate equipment availability or performance as well as poor product quality can improve a company's bottom line more radically and more quickly than most other approaches," says le Plastrier. "And it can all be done without spending anything on new plant or exotic new processes."
Lastly, the presentations showed how business intelligence is really based on the realtime manufacturing intelligence of the shop floor and the complex environment of manufacturing execution systems (MES). "InSQL 8.0 together with ActiveFactory 8.0 provides anyone in the organisation with the tools required to collate and analyse production information as well as the information needed to make boardroom decisions - whether it is realtime or historical information."
All these topics will be central to Futuristix-Wonderware's 11th X-CHANGE User Group Conference, which will be held at the Wild Coast Sun from 13 to 16 April 2003. Parties interested in attending should contact Michelle Giammartini at Just Conferences, 011 723 9900 or visit the Futuristix website.
For more information contact Mike le Plastrier, Futuristix Advanced Control Systems, 011 723 9900, [email protected], www.futuristix.co.za
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