Universal production suite promises to take on all comers

Rockwell vice president Kevin Roach says that its new FactoryTalk is not only an integrated and wide-ranging performance, production and business connectivity suite, but is based on common services and standards around aspects like security all accessed under a services orientated architecture. The result, he says, is much larger scope of supply (some the result of strategic acquisitions, like Datasweep, in the last 12 months) and hugely improved integration compared with systems available hitherto. It means that manufacturers have the chance to get the multiplicity of very individual MES applications they need, build them piecemeal, but ensure connection and support irrespective of industry, scale and location. Why now? “We’ve hit the inflection point,” says Roach, referring to a recent study by analyst AMR that suggests spending on systems to support manufacturing operations and their integration with business systems is about to outstrip that on ERP systems for the first time. “ERP has been around for a while and manufacturers seem to be realising that to get to the next level of productivity, they need to stop treating their plants like black boxes. They need visibility into them if they are to be able to flex quickly with changing market demands.” And for the proof he alludes to another analyst study – that from Aberdeen Group, which purports to demonstrate a clear correlation between world class manufacturing sites and the use of advanced MESs that enable frequent (daily or real time) measurement and dissemination of plant KPIs. “High fidelity plant information is clearly important for competitiveness,” says Roach. Which is why MES, why standards and why now. By offering a standardised suite of MES modules – as per ERP modules – Rockwell hopes to catch the wave of user interest. And, in that sense it’s no different to its competitors like Siemens, GE, ABB, Invensys and more recently Apriso, all of which have been offering their solutions to the massive MES diversity problem, which has made it so difficult to come up with anything like universally applicable packages. Roach points to larger manufacturers, some wrestling with around 500 different applications, many geared to what could be classed as MES issues – everything from WIP (work in progress) tracking to OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) monitors. “Factory Talk is intended to solve this problem by bringing together a holistic set of integrated applications so that manufacturers can build all round systems with more scope more rapidly for lower cost,” he says. For the record, it is pretty comprehensive, being organised to cover six main MES groups. First is design and configuration for creating and modelling systems. Second is front line production management – for real time co-ordination, tracking, genealogy, resource management etc. Third is data management, providing the tools and methods to collect, transform and manage plant data. Fourth is concerned with quality, compliance and regulatory reporting. Then fifth, asset management is aimed at maintaining and optimising operational plant resources – including dealing with aspects like business continuity and disaster recovery. And finally, performance and visibility provides everything from reporting systems to analytical tools, with a window that brings it all together. “It’s all integrated, modular and scaleable,” says Roach, “so users can choose one or many modules and as their requirements change, scale them up from a machine or a line to multiple lines to multiple plants in a global enterprise.