In the latest move to bring the plant and enterprise closer together, Kepware Technologies, the maker of device communication software, rolled out a connectivity suite for Oracle’s manufacturing applications.
The KEPServerEX product, which includes more than 130 communication protocols supporting more than 1,000 plant floor devices, including PLCs, I/O, and field instrumentation, now includes an interface directly into the Oracle MES for Discrete Manufacturing application, introduced last year, as well as Oracle’s Manufacturing Operations Center, a repository for plant floor data and a real-time analysis tool, which was released in April.
Kepware and Oracle have been working together since February to design plug-ins for the applications, which are part of the Oracle E-Business suite. KEPServerEX, which is compliant with the OPC device communication standard, is used by a long list of automation vendors and industrial software suppliers, including Rockwell Automation, GE Fanuc, Wonderware, and Activplant. These companies leverage the Kepware technology in order to avoid having to write their own unique communication drivers for each device.
Recently, however, enterprise applications vendors — including SAP, and now Oracle — have tapped into Kepware’s device connectivity as a way to give their customers visibility into plant floor activities.
“Oracle needed device connectivity to equipment on the plant floor [in order] to provide analytics at that level, like OEE calculations, which is what the Manufacturing Operation Center does,” said Roy Kok, Kepware’s vice president of marketing and sales, in an interview with Managing Automation.
In addition to an Oracle application interface, the Kepware connectivity suite features Advanced Tags, which have math and logic functionality that maps to existing plant floor equipment and ties in variables, such as cycle times, that are needed to do performance monitoring. The Kepware solution also includes an OPC DA Client Driver, enabling KEPServerEX to act as a gateway between third-party OPC Servers and the Oracle applications, the company said.
“Through our work with Kepware, we are enabling our joint customers to connect Oracle applications to virtually every piece of equipment on the plant floor," said Jon Chorley, Oracles vice president SCM Product Strategy, in a statement.
Manufacturers might use the real-time analysis to help them decide to move production between plants or give priority to one customer order over another, Chorley told Manufacturing Executive in an interview earlier this year.
While the solution is tailored to its applications, Oracle will not sell the Kepware software directly, as the company does not have the factory floor expertise, Kok said. Instead, it will make use of the channels such as automation OEMs and integrators.
“What Oracle benefits from in this picture is the fact that they can reference Kepware as a solution for connectivity and they know if it’s a Rockwell house they are selling to, for example, the Rockwell channels and integrators will have access to Kepware products to solve that piece of the puzzle,” Kok said.
“What Kepware brings to Oracle isn’t just connectivity,” he added, “but the knowledge that whatever hardware the customer has in place, Kepware is likely to have a relationship with the channels to support the connectivity to that hardware.”