ILS Technology LLC continues to dedicate itself to making shop floor to top floor integration a reality. The company today announced that its deviceWISE 2.0 connectivity software is compatible with the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center, enabling manufacturers to easily move real-time data between the plant floor and the enterprise.
Manufacturers can use the deviceWISE platform to collect data from automation equipment and factory floor devices, distill the data into real-time events, and transmit the information directly to the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center to improve decision-making, productivity, and profitability, ILS said.
“ILS Technology’s deviceWISE Embedded Edition platform enables leading-edge automation equipment vendors to natively connect to the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center,” said John Chorley, VP of Oracle’s supply chain strategy, in a prepared statement. “In addition, deviceWISE Enterprise Edition allows a wide variety of plant floor devices, such as PACs, PLCs, and RFID readers, to supply the enterprise domain with a continuous flow of data.”
Oracle formally introduced its Manufacturing Operations Center in April, providing a software platform for integrating data generated on the plant floor with business data managed by ERP systems. That offering competes with SAP’s Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII) product.
Using deviceWISE, manufacturers can define the data they want to move between the plant and the enterprise, said ILS COO Fred Yentz in an interview with Managing Automation. By placing the communications intelligence close to the data-collection devices in a plant, ILS’ framework reduces network infrastructure as well as network traffic. The user decides how the data is aggregated and what data to send, as well as where to send it – for example, to an MES or ERP system.
With the Oracle agreement, ILS’ other OEM partners, such as Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IBM, gain “free compatibility” with Oracle, Yentz said. “We are bridging relationships,” he added. For example, Mitsubishi’s e-F@ctory MX MES Interface IT solution can now natively connect to the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center.
ILS announced its participation, with Mitsubishi and IBM, in an automotive reference architecture earlier this year that combined Mitsubishi’s iQ Automation programmable automation controller embedded with ILS’ deviceWISE connectivity software with Mitsubishi’s MX MES Interface IT and IBM’s services-oriented architecture.
ILS’ vendor- and application-neutral product is also compatible with devices from Rockwell Automation, Siemens, Schneider Electric, GE Fanuc, and Omron, among others.
“The things we connect to today are extremely broad. We’re taking it to the next step and increasing the recommenders,” ILS CTO John Keever said. To that end, the Oracle agreement is not exclusive, and Keever acknowledged that a logical next step might be a similar agreement with SAP.
“We have to make sure we have broad adoption from the IT folks who can specify our stuff,” Yentz said.
The Enterprise Edition of deviceWISE, geared toward end users and systems integrators, addresses the problem of legacy equipment in the plant by placing the data aggregator in the server rather than at the device level. “We’ve flattened out the device tier. Every device type has a common look-and-feel for the user,” Yentz said.
In addition to reducing network traffic and customizing the type of information, the timing, and the destination for data transfer, the ILS technology offers users the advantage of eliminating custom coding, which reduces costs and time to deploy, and increases sustainability, officials said. The product also moves intelligence closer to the edge, which they said results in reduced mean times between failures.
“Manufacturing businesses need a growing volume of high-quality information about operations to make customer commitments, react to market changes, and manage global value chains, said Bob Mick, VP emerging technology at ARC Advisory Group, in the statement. “ILS Technology is providing Oracle customers with additional options for information collection with a focus on eliminating unnecessary software layers.”