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.