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.