T HE 2010 Invensys OpsManage Australia and New Zealand user confer ence took place in Sydney on 8-9 November 2010. The key theme at the event was “Real Collaboration, Real- Time Results” and centred on the real- time integration of data from all levels of process-centric companies, from produc tion through to ERP.
Attendees had an in-depth look at how InFusion ECS allows Operational Excellence across control, asset, produc tivity and environment and safety, through sessions across four tracks covering Process Control, SCADA, Safety and Critical Control, and Wonderware Business Intelligence.
Running together with the confer ence was an exhibition featuring 16 technology booths from Invensys Operations Management and its part ners, including Pepperl+Fuchs, Ad vantech and Efficientia.
Attendees also got the chance to visit the ANSTO, Wrigley’s or Colgate-Palmolive facilities on the third day, or attend additional work shops. Networking events included a cruise around Darling Harbour and recreational activities.
Tony Ho, vice-president of sales and marketing, addressed conference dele gates in a presentation titled “Operational excellence: the real time frontier for sustainable value creation”.
“We need to get real time informa tion so that we can get measurable results that link back to the strategy the company is embarking upon,” Ho told the audience.
This real-time information allows contextualising of changes, be it miti gating the risks to clients emanating from changes on the plant floor, or adjusting processes in response to changes in market demand.
He identified a number of key prob lems with getting real-time information transfer between different levels of control. Business and strategic controls, for example, tend to characterise time in years, quarters and months, while production and process controls on the plant floor operate in hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. Synchronising these time units present a real challenge.
Additionally, there are typically 150 different solutions, tools and systems present in the various layers of controls in any given enterprise. Invensys claims integrating these and linking the different layers is the key for real-time solutions. While connecting, measuring, controlling, visualising, modelling and scaling are important tasks, Ho says the focus needs to be on managing these within a single instance.
Invensys says the holistic nature of its IOM framework is in response to the convergence in technology and customer demand. IOM is a platform for launching integration and synchronisa tion efforts. It is agnostic to any vendor, allowing the use of data and devices from different manufacturers.
According to Ho, the industry has reduced capital expenditure investment over the recent years, but solutions such as those offered by Invensys and its part ners provide measurable returns, and operational excellence is based not on a one-time investment, but on a contin uous process of investment and returns.
While acknowledging the difficulty of achieving real-time integration, Invensys says it has developed a roadmap and a journey, with demonstrable prod ucts and solutions which will achieve the results its customers demand.