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GE Fanuc Unveils New Version of Monitoring and Control Software

by Diane Himes, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Monday, March 19, 2007 6:30:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

GE Fanuc late last week announced the availability of Proficy HMI/SCADA - CIMPLICITY 7.0, the latest version of its supervisory monitoring and control software.

One of the most significant aspects of the release is the software's improved integration with other components of GE Fanuc's Proficy suite of automation software, CIMPLICITY product manager Gimmi Filice told Managing Automation in an interview. The Proficy family contains change management, historian, data analysis, and Web-based portal products.

In addition to tighter integration with other products in the Proficy suite, three major themes in the 7.0 release are enhancements that aim to facilitate developer productivity, operator productivity, and increased CNC connectivity.

"For end users [or] anybody deploying Proficy components, the integration capability means that CIMPLICITY is a plug-and-play add-on," ARC Advisory Group research director Craig Resnick said in an interview.

"Over the years, GE Fanuc has made a number of acquisitions that include separate best-in-class software packages," said Roy Kok, GE Fanuc product marketing manager for HMI/SCADA products, in an interview. "In the last few years, the company has focused on integrating these to create a best-in-class automation suite, in which users can share information [among applications] more naturally."

Key Proficy family components that integrate with the CIMPLICITY Workbench include:

• Proficy Change Management: Provides file version management and disaster recovery.

• Proficy Real-Time Information Portal: Provides Web-based data display, allowing operators access to plant-wide on-line and process-based systems for decision support and continuous process improvement.

• Proficy Historian: Complements CIMPLICITY's relational database-centric archiving, with sustained throughput rates of more than 100,000 samples per second.

• Proficy View - Machine Edition: Provides a logical progression of functionality from a dedicated HMI to the broader client-server and SCADA capabilities of CIMPLICITY, aggregating data, alarms, and events from Proficy View applications.

Resnick told Managing Automation that change management is absolutely critical in today's manufacturing environments, where track-and-trace functionality is required in the event of a product recall to identify precisely when and where a product variable has changed, including information on who had access to a particular process and when.

"Our customers are struggling with change management. While there has always been strong [demand for change management capabilities] in regulated industries, customers [in other industries are increasingly] concerned about recalls and brand management... Change management provides security against disasters that can affect brand equity," Kok said.

In addition, change management is critical when managing a multitude of disparate software applications on the factory floor — including keeping track of upgrades, patches, different systems running different versions, and when they were changed, Resnick said.

"Plenty of vendor and software tools are available for change management," Resnick said, but the fact that Proficy change management capabilities are integrated with the CIMPLICITY workbench is what sets it apart from other such tools, he said.

CIMPLICITY also provides automated backup capabilities, with an "undo" type of functionality for use when creating and editing software. "The 'undo' function is a tremendous time saver for making changes to software. Instead of recreating the wheel, an operator can go back to a previous version when changing the formulation in a food and beverage application, for example. If you need to change a few lines of code in the software and don't like the result, you can get back to a point where it worked and try to re-perfect the process," Resnick said.

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