With an eye toward giving manufacturers greater insight for conducting maintenance operations, GE Fanuc today released the Proficy Maintenance Gateway, a new application in its Production Management software suite.
The Gateway is intended to act as a bridge between plant floor assets and a manufacturer’s maintenance system. Real-time data from the control layer — including PLCs, distributed control systems, and CNC machines — is coordinated via the Gateway with a company’s asset management system for use in planning maintenance activities.
In its inaugural release, the Proficy Maintenance Gateway is limited to data exchange between GE Fanuc’s Proficy Plant Applications and IBM’s MAXIMO enterprise asset management (EAM) software. Later versions will extend that out-of-the-box integration to other EAM systems, including SAP Enterprise Asset Management and Datastream 7i, said Barry Lynch, the company’s Proficy product manager.
Once future versions encompass SAP EAM and Datastream 7i, the product will cover the vast majority of asset management applications in use in manufacturing, Lynch told Managing Automation in an interview.
The heart and soul of the Gateway application is its rules-based configuration engine. The software feature allows users to define the various data streams to track as well as what actions the system can trigger based on specific conditions.
“It was always in our mind it would be a maintenance person who would be going in there doing this,” Lynch said. So the company designed the product with two interfaces. The IT staff accesses one interface to set up the server, configure the connections between the Proficy and MAXIMO applications, and browse the available shop floor and MAXIMO data. A plant floor worker can then access a drag-and-drop interface that allows him or her to adjust the business rules that govern the system.
A worker, for instance, may want to create a notification if a particular machine produces more than 10 rejects in a one-hour period. Another rule might be that when a temperature level exceeds 200 degrees Fahrenheit the system triggers an emergency work order that is issued to the appropriate technician.
Another feature of the Gateway is the ability to run reports in the Proficy software on the shop floor — workers can query the MAXIMO from the shop floor, obviating the need to access a separate system for the data, Lynch said. Those reports may, for instance, point to the need to run more frequent maintenance checks on a machine in order to improve its uptime.
The Gateway release echoes the company’s recent name change; GE Fanuc added “Intelligent Platforms” to its title in 2007, reflecting the push by the company — and similar efforts by other automation providers — to create a more intelligent factory that uses resources more efficiently, based on real-time data.
Maintenance has been a focal point of that effort as in many factories it remains a sorely underdeveloped facet of plant strategy. Products such as the Proficy Maintenance Gateway aim to turn routine maintenance into as-needed maintenance by delivering data on the health of plant assets.
Lynch described one of the classic competitors of the Gateway as home-built integrations undertaken by IT employees working in Visual Basic script. Gateway’s accessibility to plant floor workers sets it apart, he said.
The Proficy Maintenance Gateway is available now. The $45,000 price tag includes the server that runs the Gateway as well as the connections between the MAXIMO and Proficy applications.