The primary industrial gases supplier in Australia, Linde AG of Germany, has chosen GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ Proficy Historian and Proficy Plant Applications for use in its plants worldwide as part of a $1 million order from the supplier.
GE Fanuc’s products, which are part of its Operations Management software suite, will be deployed in 350 Linde Group sites worldwide.
The Linde Group is a global leader in gases and engineering, with almost 52,000 employees in approximately 100 countries. The company’s strategy is geared towards earnings-based growth and focused on the expansion of its international business, based on forward-looking gases applications and plant construction solutions.
Linde expanded through several acquisitions in the last few years, which brought along legacy commitments to manufacturing systems from other vendors. While Linde had experience with GE Fanuc’s Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX product, each part of their business was satisfied with the solutions they had installed and were resistant to significant change, according to a press notice from GE Fanuc.
The company’s management realised the need to standardise on a global historian infrastructure as the data foundation upon which to standardise operating practices, production reporting, and information flow across its enterprise. Based on its experience with iFIX they invited GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms to participate in the bidding for the new system, the company said.
“At the end of it all, Linde selected Proficy software because we had a superior solution at a fair price and were willing to work closely with them,” said GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms vice president of software, Erik Udstuen.
“Linde required a very large system (400,000 tags) and had high expectations for performance and scalability. Pilot evaluations proved that our Proficy Historian performed very well and compared very favourably to the competition.”
The Proficy solution is the basis of a Plant Line Information Management System, consisting of a centralised historical database installation. Proficy Historian provides a robust and effective plant data repository to collect, archive and distribute large volumes of real-time, plant floor information quickly and easily.
Several ROC (Remote Operation Center) systems access data via Proficy HMI/SCADA – iFIX on a terminal server basis to evaluate production data and to control processes. The team chose iFIX as the Historian client providing easy integration.
The Linde Plant Information Management system is completed with GE Fanuc’s Proficy Plant Applications to process raw data, calculate and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) to act on current business data. These KPIs will deliver insights into the company’s production performance information to optimise the efficiency of the gas production and increase the quality of the processes.
As part of the deal, GE Fanuc will also install Proficy Real-Time Information Portal to enable Linde management to retrieve production data and determine cost influences caused by certain production events. Novotek, a solution partner of GE Fanuc’s in Europe, supports the entire solution with its Trendview and Alarm Analysis tool for data evaluation.