Mobile PDAs set to move with maintenance engineers throughout industry

Wonderware says it will form a new mobile solutions group to grow the SAT business, bringing manufacturing and maintenance visibility and task management to mobile workers and their managers across all of industry. The PDAs are already being used by Exxon and Chevron plant engineers and have been being resold by Honeywell under the name IntelaTrac PKS for several years. John Bailey, managing director of Wonderware UK, believes the acquisition will catapult engineers’ mobile PDAs into the rest of industry – starting with petrochemicals and the power sector, and then going wide into the utilities and beyond. “This has the potential to be as big as inTouch SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition]. Maintenance engineers will be able to forget paper and get all their work instructions and plant history from the PDA – and feed their measurements back into it in real time.”