Boston -- Declaring that it was making its most significant control system product announcement since the introduction of the I/A Series system in 1987, Invensys today unveiled InFusion, a technology the UK-based company claims is "the world's first enterprise control system."
During a press conference here, Invensys executives and partners took the wraps off a next-generation process control system that is part architecture, part product, and part object library. "Today, we announce a new class of system that addresses many if not all of the issues in the marketplace," said Mike Caliel, president of Invensys Process Management. "I believe this is truly a groundbreaking announcement."
Built on ArchestrA, the company's integration architecture, as well as on a number of existing Invensys products, InFusion ties tightly into the Microsoft operating environment through .Net and into SAP's enterprise offerings via that company's NetWeaver platform. Charles Johnson, Microsoft's worldwide manufacturing industry managing director, and Rick Bullotta, vice president of ASM Manufacturing at SAP, attended the press conference.
As part of the InFusion package, six new applications were disclosed: InFusion Access, a library of 325 "data acquisition servers," as Invensys described them; InFusion View, which presents data in a consistent view; InFusion Collaboration Wall, for communication across organizational silos; InFusion Engineering Environment, a language-independent way to build applications using visual objects; InFusion Field Device Manager, an open tool set to configure field devices; and InFusion Historian, a SQL-based tool that taps into a variety of data.
The goal of the enterprise control system is to erase the boundaries of the five-layer Purdue model, which spans from field devices up to enterprise applications and separates automation and control. "The evolution of the enterprise control system is to move to a control loop within the business, not just individual variables," said Chris Lyden, Invensys's vice president of global marketing.
To do that, InFusion spans all of Invensys Process Systems' businesses and many of its products, including Wonderware HMI and plant intelligence applications, Triconix safety and critical control, Foxboro SCADA and diagnostic tools, SimSci-Esscor simulation software, and the Avantis real-time condition monitoring and enterprise asset management applications. It will also reach up into MES and ERP applications as a result of in-depth development efforts that leverage .NET, BizTalk Server 2004, SAP NetWeaver, and xMII technologies. In addition, industry standards inherent within InFusion include Open O&M for manufacturing-to-enterprise integration, MIMOSA for maintenance-to-enterprise integration, and OPC for real-time connectivity on the plant floor.
"InFusion is the first fully compliant, Open O&M system," said Peter Martin, vice president, Performance Management and Invensys IPS.
The next-generation enterprise control system Invensys unveiled today is the latest attempt to bridge the gap between the plant floor and the executive office. Several years ago, under former Invensys CEO Allen Yurko, Invensys attempted a sensor-to-boardroom initiative that included the acquisition of Baan, an ERP company. Invensys officials today seemed to acknowledge the earlier attempt, saying past efforts by the industry to connect the plant floor to enterprise systems were mostly confined to Powerpoint exercises that produced little tangible result.
Today, Invensys said that conditions to make the enterprise connection have changed, thanks to technology developments and the emergence of better standards such as Open O&M.
Technology has traditionally been viewed as the cause of the corporate-wide disconnect. But the islands created over the years are not technology- or automation-related, Martin said. Rather, they stem from organizational and jurisdictional differences.
"The biggest problem in the industry today is that people don't like each other," Martin said.
In the plant, that dynamic translates into conflict in the way things are measured. An operations manager and a maintenance engineer might be viewing the same asset base, but they also may be running it differently. On top of that, in the enterprise, the accountants in the finance department -- responsible for inventory and capital expenditures -- often don't even have the same definition of what an asset is.
It is a symptom of a problem that started in the 1970s when plant productivity focused on operator efficiency. In 1987 -- the year Invensys rolled out its I/A Series distributed control system -- the shift toward engineering efficiency began. By 2005, plant efficiency and business optimization were the focal points, spurred by economic and competitive pressures including globalization, overcapacity, and more regulatory compliance. The problem, however, is that over the years, manufacturers have cut staff -- specifically, engineers.
"The traditional process areas are running worse than ever because of a cut in headcount," Martin said. "In the 1990s, engineers were cut because management didn't understand where they brought value."
Now, those same companies are struggling to get back on track, and that's where Invensys hopes to step in with InFusion. The company has developed a metric to measure and contextualize information so that people can start creating economic value. But first, they have to know what the economic value is.
The InFusion engineering environment adds a unified, system-wide Integrated Development Environment (IDE) as well as object-based Application Object Models for equipment, units (otherwise known as processing lines), as well as for the plant. And it is much more than just a middleware play, Martin notes. Rather, InFusion is a collaborative tool. These "nested" application objects can be configured, cloned, and re-used with minimum time and effort.
To deliver this collaborative enterprise control system, Invensys Process Solutions has organized three teams with a systematic approach to reengineering manufacturing to make it part of the overall business. The performance team tackles the base assets -- pumps, valves, motors, compressors. The industry team defines assets sets including unit lines, plant areas, and training, and the business performance team is a consulting practice that takes a holistic view of the entire plant to define its role in the enterprise.
In a question-and-answer session following the press conference, Lyden said that InFusion should be looked at as a system that will not replace a DCS such as I/A, but, rather, as a system designed to address a different set of problems.
"InFusion addresses a category of problems that transcend the boundaries of a DCS," he said.
Asked what Invensys's business expectations are around InFusion, Invensys CEO Ulf Henriksson said that the company has marketshare ambitions.
"It's about taking marketshare in our installed base and among our competitors where they have some link with us," he said. "It will also open up completely new markets. We are breaking new ground here."