Invensys Software Conference & Technical Support Symposium: It Was The Place To Be!

 

opening session of Invensys Software Conference & Tech Support Symposium

 

What can you say about a conference offering over 190 sessions, outstanding customer speakers, compelling product roadmaps and unexpected social events? You'd say, another fine Wonderware/IntelaTrac/SimSci/Avantis party!

The 2013 Invensys Software Conference was titled "The Industrial Software Revolution Begins Now" and it delivered. Featuring presentations from Invensys, new family member InduSoft, global partner Microsoft, the conference covered not only customer case story successes, but technical tips & tricks from the field support engineers, product updates from all brands, and educational tracks from the Technical Support Symposium speakers. Whether you were there for a "one chili pepper" high level product overview to a "four chili pepper" technical deep dive, there was something for everyone's taste.

Something new this year was our social media challenge--who could tweet enough content over the 3 days to win a gift card? With over 250 tweets, the winner was the @everdyners group.

Other highlights were:

Expert: Food trends to watch as population grows, with comments

http://www.progressivegrocer.com/top-stories/headlines/market-trends/id40177/expert-column-the-future-of-our-food/

This article from Progressive Grocer aptly captures the needs and demands of customers as the food supply chain becomes more complicated and the information needs of the consumers becomes more pronounced. The public is becoming more educated, and the onus is on the suppliers to become more transparent, not only in the ingredients, but likely in the sourcing of location, the way the products have been processed, and the extent of the supply chain prior to final placement in stores.

We as providers to the industry can assist in the information gathering and oversight of the food manufacturing process. The technology is called MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) and it's been around for over 25 years.  Tracking from raw materials through finished goods, MES offers supply chain transparency, processing visibility, and a "system of record" of the transformation.  As consumers demand more insight, MES is a great way for processors to create an environment of conformance & compliance, responding to government regulations (such as the Food Safety Act) as well as establishing an infrastructure for Good Manufacturing Practices for the processor as a means of self-regulation.

There are a number of providers of MES--check out www.mesa.org and of course Wonderware offers a wide suite of solutions to scale from a single plant through an enterprise. MES is the way the industry can respond to more demanding, and changing, consumer tastes.

SolutionsPT Blog : Integration Key to Optimising Performance in Batch...

SolutionsPT Blog : Integration Key to Optimising Performance in Batch...: An integrated solution to optimise real-time performance, specifically designed for complex batch processes is now available.  Wonderware I...

MESA's Metrics That Matter Study: YOUR opinion matters!

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Manufacturing-Metrics-that-Actually-Matter---Let-Us-Know-What-You-Think-.html?soid=1101863098727&aid=NwdmGVlAD5I

Invensys is a proud sponsor of the MESA Metrics That Matter Study.  Hundreds of respondees help to bring clarity to the current strategies, care-abouts and initiatives within the manufacturing community.  Join us, won't you, by taking this study?  Thanks!

Invensys and Microsoft, Together Again at the LATAM CIO Leadership Forum 2013

From Sept 30 through October 3, 2013 Invensys joined Microsoft’s Latin America CIO Leadership Forum in Miami, FL.  This event was created for CIO’s from government, industry and education, and offered a full program for both peer networking and deep-dive presentations.

Covering key IT topics as the cloud, devices and apps, mobility, big data, the forum also featured a case study from HP, and product updates from their CRM, Office and ERP teams.

Building on the interest for big data, the cloud, and mobility, Invensys showed solutions for food and beverage and CPG, water/wastewater and oil and gas.

Invensys Solutions for Food and Beverage, CPG were shown at the CIO Summit, based on Microsoft's technology stack

Bill Schiel and Marcelo Zaremba discussed with attendees scalable solutions based on Wonderware MES, SCADA as well as Consulting and Services offerings.

Invensys' Marcelo Zaremba discusses manufacturing operations solutions with CIO

For CIO’s, key care-abouts are keeping up with the pace of technology that is occurring today.  The cloud offers opportunities for cost savings, scalability, and ubiquitous access to applications enterprise-wide, but it also brings with it needed policies for security and standardization.   Mobility and the “Bring Your Own Device” momentum challenge CIOs with creating policies for compliance and multi-platform support. And Big Data feeds the needs for better analysis, knowledge management and decision making, but CIO’s must face multiple data source consolidation/acquisition and visualization.

Microsoft and Invensys, together have created solutions that build on the base technologies of big data, mobility and cloud.  For more information, please visit http://iom.invensys.com/EN/Pages/IOM_PartnersMicrosoft.aspx and for our cloud solutions based on Azure,  http://global.wonderware.com/EN/Pages/InvensysCloudforManufacturing.aspx

Repost, with comments: Cloud is the New Wild West

http://mobileenterprise.edgl.com/news/Cloud-is-the-New-Wild-West88883
We at Invensys have seen how customer, and really industry, interest in cloud computing has increased over the past year.  It started when virtualization became a common offering for industrial automation. Both VMware and Microsoft made offerings of ESXi and Hyper-V (respectively) "industrialized" so that automation software providers, such as Invensys and others, could use their technologies to provide application portability, as well as more strategic offerings such as High Availability and Fault Tolerance.

Virtualization, as Microsoft and others like to say, is a stepping stone to the cloud, because once you've isolated and "packaged" your application, it doesn't matter whether it's on a box on site ("on-premises") or truly in the cloud.  And if you check out the industrial automation industry, the number of cloud-based offerings, either hosted or as a Software as a Service, have tripled in the past years.  Applications such as remote monitoring, smart device enabled reporting, and process historians are now readily available in the cloud.  We anticipate the number of offerings to triple again, as technology becomes more secure and the infrastructure required to support the cloud products is stabilized and proliferated.  It's a great opportunity for manufacturers to cost-effectively be able to test products without making a huge investment in infrastructure, IT and hardware. 

So, if you would like to see what offerings are available--I have an event for you....it's an Eye Opener Seminar, either in Chicago or Boston, November 12 or 14th.  It's free to attend, there will be representatives from Microsoft, Invensys, and Saugatuck, and it can answer all of your questions about the viability, and use, of the cloud for industry.  You can register here.

SmartGlance recent release--Windows 8 support for PC & Surface Tablets

SmartGlance for Windows 8 (PC and Surface)

Win 8 Tiles and easy-to-use navigation

Introducing Live Dashboards: Dynamic and real-time changes of your KPIs and data

Multi column view and Auto sizing of columns

Pinpoint problems in just one glance by viewing multiple columns of data on each screen

 

GPS and Map integration

Easily locate your asset or plant from withinSmartGlance: