Process manufacturing software purveyor Aspen Technology this week rolled out an updated version of its aspenONE V7 process optimization suite that keys in on reducing costs and simplifying operations throughout the manufacturing and supply chain. It also supports decision making, the company said, by integrating plant floor and enterprise data, and providing all constituents the same view into inventory, demand, and actual production.

AspenONE V7 Manufacturing & Supply Chain (MSC) is the planning, production, and advanced process control module of a software suite that features process engineering at its core. The company caters to process industries, including oil exploration and production, chemicals, and pharmaceutical makers. The latest MSC offering adds more advanced multifunction controllers that can scale down to smaller systems, and also features the ability to synchronize information between the enterprise and the refinery while adding forensic genealogy of batch productions.

Collectively, those new functions allow users to “make decisions closer to the process [in order] to improve agility,” said Greg Howard, AspenTech’s vice president of product marketing, in an interview with Managing Automation.

Within the MSC application, the updated Advanced Process Control platform includes multiple control formats that can be configured quickly for new types of applications. For example, AspenTech’s DMC model-predictive controller has typically been deployed on large refinery processes, such as a catalytic cracker, but it has not been an affordable solution for smaller downstream processes. Now, with new embedded capabilities, the controller can be more easily configured to work downstream without incurring too much extra cost.

“We’ve had a lot of experience deploying advanced process control over the years on multiple processes, so we embedded a lot of [intellectual property] into the configuration to facilitate getting these things up and running,” Howard explained. “The idea is you don’t have to go offline to figure this out. You can do it within the application using a drag-and-drop series of pre-configured elements to get controllers online more quickly.”

In the context of the petroleum supply chain, the MSC software can now share the planning and scheduling data from the refinery with enterprise workers to close the loop with production, scheduling, distribution, and inventory management. MSC can be integrated with AspenTech’s own demand management application or a third-party ERP system to allow refinery planners and schedulers, along with distribution schedulers and traders, to collaborate more effectively and answer complex questions faster, the company said.

“Feedstock is the highest cost for a refinery,” Howard said. “To coordinate what is happening in the refinery and the decision making associated with feedstock is a tremendous opportunity in terms of ROI and making good decisions rather than basing things on old information.”

In the batch management realm, MSC can now track what is going into a finished product, an important aspect of any FDA-regulated company. Through input from historians, lab, and quality systems, a backward view of how a batch was created — including raw materials, production tanks used, and the processes that took place — can be identified, analyzed, and managed.

Like the flagship aspenONE Process Engineering software, MSC is now available in a token commercial model, which means customers buy tokens that can be applied to the applications they need. So, rather than purchasing a large software license for the entire software suite, manufacturers buy into a contract that provides them access to all products. They then refer to a menu of products — each with a token value — and invest in what makes sense for their organization, the company said.