Gary Mintchell's Feed Forward

Schneider Electric announced its PlantStruxure architecture, a new collaborative system that allows industrial and infrastructure companies to meet their automation needs and at the same time deliver on growing energy management requirements. The system offers flexible, scalable and collaborative architectures that are the building blocks for manufacturing and process within Schneider Electric’s comprehensive EcoStruxure energy management architecture portfolio.

EcoStruxure allows organizations to improve energy efficiencies across multiple domains of business including process automation. PlantStruxure integrates bothagement solution that allows companies to optimize their energy usage and drive maximum efficiency within their operations while also improving productivity.

PlantStruxure combines a platform from the Citect software acquisition along with manufacturing automation, building automation and electrical power products and expertise. On top of these are support for a variety of networks, especially Ethernet-based technologies.

Here's another announcement at the ARC Press Conference Marathon. Yokogawa Electric Corp. announced the release of VigilantPlan Services, a package of automation service solutions to help manufacturers achieve safe, environmentally friendly and profitable plant operations in line with the Yokogawa VigilantPlant concept.

The company reorganized its operational and consulting services business, under the VigilantPlant Services name. It includes three basic types of services: Opportunity Identification; Solution Implementation; and Lifecycle Effectiveness. Opportunity identification includes identifing new improvement possibilities and optimum solutions through free plant analysis, comparative effectiveness analysis, management seminars, master planning and leader development programs. Yokogawa provides services to help implement solutions.

Finally, Yokogawa continually maintains and reevaluates these solutions for its customers to ensure that they remain effective throughout the plant lifecycle. Yokogawa has announced at ARC’s 2010 World Industry Forum the launch of Modular Procedural Automation (MPA). "Operational knowledge and the accompanying skill sets are leaving the workplace due to retirement, and consequently the availability of good operators to run process systems is diminishing," states Maurice Wilkins, vice president, Yokogawa IA Global Marketing Center "By applying MPA a company can preserve the knowledge of the best operator on his or her best day
every day, which enables running a process in an optimal state."

MPA is an open and modular approach to procedures that is production centric, not bound by systems and defines the right balance between manual, prompted, and automated procedures. MPA starts with a consultative assessment of a site’s procedural needs. A recommendation will then be made as to the best platform for the customer to achieve their desired result. Prompted procedures may be implemented on any control system using Exapilot, while fully automated procedures may need Centum VP solution or a combination of both.

Invensys Operations Management has released a new version of InFusion Enterprise Control System (ECS). The InFusion ECS 2.0  features new software platform updates building on the ArchestrA object model. Some of the new enhancements, which are actually incorporation of these existing products into the object model, include integration with the company’s Foxboro I/A Series distributed control system and SCADA hardware and software offerings, open integration with "virtually any other automation or information system," and enhanced platform integration with the company’s latest applications, including its Wonderware batch, manufacturing execution systems (MES), mobile workforce management, enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) and enterprise business system integration offerings.

One confusion about InFusion is that it is a specific product. The name really describes technology and strategy for integrating first the company's many products assembled through acquisition over several years. One cannot discuss licenses for InFusion. Rather the question on penetration of the market would relate to number of products that are incorporated within the platform. Therefore, this release expands that number.