Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Wireless Apps, Cloud Services Transform Decision Making

Key to the producer’s growth strategy is capital efficiency—getting the most out of its facilities and equipment. To help accomplish this, the company checks its lines for OEE (overall equipment efficiency) and production rates in real time with the help of the Invensys SmartGlance mobile reporting system, which makes information available to users in real time, 24/7.

Using mobile devices, management reviews production reports. In some cases, it will discover that one of the plant locations did not meet a target. With the “drill down” capability in the SmartGlance application, a manager can go to the next information level for that plant location and view line performance. There, a manager might discover that a particular line was down. Drilling down still further, he can view all the equipment in that line where he can pinpoint the packaging machine in question and check its OEE. All this can be done in-house or remotely. Other aspects of the SmartGlance application allow data to be compared with ideal batches, providing support for determining corrective actions.

Information from the plant processes is collected via local monitoring and control systems and resides on a secure cloud server. Using a combination of SmartGlance and Microsoft technologies, data is then available on demand to a smart mobile device, which for this producer is the iPhone. When the data travels to and from the cloud server, the service is fully secured, providing authentication, authorization, and encryption.

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