National Instruments (NI), the measurement and automation specialist, has had a presence in South Africa for many years through its representative Westplex in Randburg. The innovative US-based company has experienced double-digit annual growth since the company was founded in the mid-'70s and in order to maintain this into the future the new strategy is to establish a physical presence in most countries and regions where the company is active. The last five years has seen numerous new branches being established and amongst the countries chosen was South Africa, this branch office will service the sub-Saharan African region. Major new expansion areas also included Latin America and Eastern Europe. The local NI office became operational late last year with Field Engineer and Office Manager Mike Hutton. National Instruments in South Africa will continue to work closely with Westplex, which are still providing full logistical support for the product range.
Hutton is South African and he basically became very familiar with the NI range of products while working for Debtech, the De Beers R&D facility. He knew the company's engineers and sales people from their frequent visits to this country and when the opportunity arose for a local National Instruments person he grasped it. National Instruments are more than thorough in their approach and Mike spent the best part of a year at their headquarters in Austin, Texas, where he worked as an applications engineer while on the Engineering Leadership Program. The course included much product-specific technical training but real value for Hutton came through his interaction with NI's American customers and finding solutions to their requirements and problems. He returned to Johannesburg in October last year with the objective of establishing an office in Midrand where he will shortly be joined by another South African, Dennis Naude, who is currently finishing off his extensive training. While Hutton will be responsible for managing the local operations as well as technical sales and marketing, Naude will take care of technical support for National Instrument customers.
With the vast range of products on offer from National Instruments (the catalogue is almost 1000 pages long and details more than 900 products) the company finds that one of the best ways to market and make customers familiar with their capability is through seminars. Since returning from the USA Mike has already presented seven, and has another ten planned throughout the country over the next five months. These seminars are specially designed to look at applications rather than just products, as the NI philosophy is of course to mix and match standard products to suit the application needs. While it would be impossible to cover the entire range of products and solutions offered in a short article a short overview of some interesting areas provides the extent of the company's capability.
Some of the National Instruments products and company philosophy
OPC (OLE for process control) is the open industry standard device interface that provides for interoperability between different field devices and the automation and control system. National Instruments is committed to the development of industry (rather than proprietary) standards and all NI products offer immediate compatibility with the wide range of other OPC-compatible products on the market. National Instruments was in fact a founder member of the OPC Foundation, which has driven the development and enhancement of the OPC specification, and has encouraged its adoption by instrument suppliers.
NI offers a complete range of FieldPoint modular I/O systems that are intended for distributed monitoring and control applications being provided in a rugged industrial DIN rail package. A FieldPoint network module comprises a bank of analog and digital I/O modules that are connected to an industrial network through Ethernet TCP/IP, RS232, RS485, wireless or Foundation Fieldbus. FieldPoint software is provided free with the hardware and greatly simplifies the use of these modules and their integration with the network. The FieldPoint range also includes a full-function OPC server that has a full suite of software for interfacing FieldPoint systems to application software packages.
A major product line is CompactPCI that offers superior mechanical integrity, easy integration and more slots than the standard desktop PCs. The plug in cards for this are also more robust and industrialised and cover every data acquisition need including signal conditioning solutions for a full range of sensors including thermocouples, RTDs, strain gauges and current and voltage transducers. Other integration modules include high-speed oscilloscopes and multimeters. The CompactPCI is compatible with legacy systems as it can control GPIB and VXI instruments. The chassis is available in a variety of forms that are suitable for portable, bench-top and rack-mounted use.
One of the flagship products of National Instruments is indubitably its well-known LabVIEW software. LabVIEW was designed specifically for the test & measurement environment with data acquisition. The software package is available for virtually every operating system, including Windows 2000 and all its predecessors, Mac OS, Linux, Sun Solaris and HP-UX. Key to the use of the software is the large number of instrument drivers, which can be directly downloaded from the NI website. Instrument-specific drivers are available for an incredible range of T&M instruments from companies, which include Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, Nicolet, Anritsu, Fluke, Keithley and of course National Instruments. As of 1998 National Instruments along with several other companies formed what is known as the Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) Foundation. The IVI Foundation now has some fifty members including all the largest instrumentation suppliers and formal standards have now been defined for instrument drivers. Five classes of instrument are currently covered by these standards (which means that instrument models and makes can be interchanged without software modification) and these are digital multimeters, oscilloscopes, arbitrary waveform and function generators, DC power supplies and switches. With these virtual interface standards product-specific instrument drivers are no longer required and instruments are recognised by type with full direct interchangeability.
Another important area of activity for NI is machine vision and both image acquisition boards and a wide range of image processing software are offered. Their IMAQ hardware can be used with any type of camera including CCD and thermal imaging systems. Standard options include 2-D bar code readers and optical character recognition software. NI does not supply cameras, lenses or lighting but has a number of partners that it refers customers to. It also has alliance members throughout the USA and Europe who will deliver custom machine vision systems and solutions to customer specification. The list of applications today for machine vision is endless but some proven applications for which details are available on the NI website are:
* Dashboard instrument cluster calibration and inspection.
* Windscreen glass inspection and defect analysis.
* Label inspection in the pharmaceutical industry.
* Inspection and manufacturing of credit cards.
* Seedling analysis.
* Automated analysis of ultrasound images.
* Thermal mapping of integrated circuits.
Since its founding, National Instruments has maintained a strong expertise in GPIB (general purpose interface bus). The company supplies a variety of quality GPIB controller solutions that take advantage of state-of-the-art technology in computers and workstations. Over the years NI has redefined GPIB controller technology and rightly considers itself to be an expert in this field. Its catalogue proudly states the following: "Are you looking for the right GPIB controller, instrument drivers, information on high-speed GPIB and the latest GPIB application notes? Just give us a call and we will help you find what you need."
Summary
National Instruments had a turnover in 2000 of more than $350m and has a goal of becoming a 'billion dollar company'. Worldwide it has in the region of 3000 employees and in the year 2000 for the first time foreign sales exceeded those in the United States itself. The company's origins go back to the mid 1970s and one of the founders was Dr James Truchard, who is today President. The first product produced by NI was a GPIB interface card for IBM.
As for the industry sectors that NI services it is virtually anywhere where measurement and/or automation are required. There is however a major focus on the telecommunications, automotive, semiconductor, medical, aerospace and electronics industries. In the local context we can most certainly add mining and the petrochemical sectors.
With the new local presence of National Instruments and the enhanced ability for the company to provide on-the-spot solutions for local industry Mike Hutton believes that the already strong sales of their product line could easily double over the next few years. A key part of the strategy is that NI will through Mike and Dennis provide the resource to solve those specific local problems, if the parent company has not done that already.
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