2009 Summer breakfast road show

This is not the time for fair-weather friends. The only way we’re going to get through the current economic upheaval is to stick together, coordinate resources and have everyone pull their weight. Cooperation, logic and ingenuity are powerful tools that will help get us out of the present situation

Somewhere during this year’s national 14-venue summer breakfast road show, Wonderware Southern Africa served its 15 000th helping of food for thought – and the thought on everybody’s mind these days is how to get more for less.

Central to this theme is the concept of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) which is one of the most important tools for discovering hidden capacity and pinpointing the cause of inefficiencies quickly.

Another way to make the most of assets is to enlist the help of the mobile workforce. With roughly only half of all plants being instrumented, it’s vital that operator observations be logged in such a way as to extend the reach of SCADA in order to detect potential problem areas early. Wonderware’s Intelatrac is designed with just this in mind and has links to all popular EAM/CMMS systems.

Wonderware’s Historian 10.0 (enterprise version) is designed to facilitate the collation and calculation of data to greatly reduce network traffic by providing the answers rather than the raw data. Some of its functionality includes the removal of noisy data, interpolating missing data, the elimination of spikes, the ability to treat analogue data as discrete data and advanced analysis features among many others.

Also presented was Wonderware’s HMI Reports whose low cost and ease of use has attracted a lot of attention from InTouch and non-Wonderware users as well.

But perhaps the most exciting announcement at the breakfast was the imminent release of Wonderware Intelligence due in the first quarter of 2010. This is an Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence solution which is probably as significant to the mining and manufacturing industries as IT is to ERP. And here’s the understatement of the year: Wonderware Intelligence’s ability to collect, collate and contextualise data from any number of disparate sources and from any number of plants and turn it into information which is meaningful from the viewer’s point of view is truly staggering.