Six months after the introduction of InFusion, Invensys's distinctively dubbed "enterprise control system," the concept of a single control architecture for business and plant applications seems to be resonating with manufacturers.
As of August, Invensys says it has logged over $10 million in orders for InFusion. And the sales funnel -- i.e., orders pending -- was greater than company projections for the entire year, according to officials.
Invensys took the industry by surprise this past April when it redefined distributed control. Prior to the public disclosure, only 60 people within Invensys had a deep understanding of InFusion, which means even competitors likely were taken off guard by the fact that the unveiling was more than mere re-branding. Rather, it was a major architectural overhaul that analyst firms like AMR Research have said blurs the application boundaries that have traditionally hindered shop-floor-to-top-floor information flow.
The technology, built on Invensys's ArchestrA framework, blends control, plant intelligence, asset management, and simulation and optimization capabilities. Moreover, the architecture does not distinguish between Invensys technology and a competitor's distributed control system (DCS). And that's what customers want, the company says.
"Clients developing RFPs are starting to demand things like connecting three different DCSs on the plant floor into one computing space, as well as tying into a JD Edwards system," explains Peter Martin, Invensys's vice president of performance management. The evidence that InFusion is gaining traction is in the contract wins. The company is still keeping some of its customer orders under wraps, but the majority are large SCADA wins, Martin notes, such as the order from CHS Inc., a Fortune 500 diversified supplier of food, grain, and energy products. CHS selected an Infusion-based SCADA system for pipelines running to its Montana refinery.
In June, Invensys announced that Williams Power will implement an InFusion-based Generation Management System for its fleet of electrical assets. Overseas, the Laffan Refinery, currently under construction in Qatar, awarded a multimillion dollar contract to Invensys that will include some InFusion-ready technology. These deals, Invensys says, demonstrate the versatility of the InFusion design.
To be considered an InFusion win, specific technical requirements must be present, including the ArchestrA application server; Data Access servers, which are a library of communication interfaces; and an engineering environment based on reusable objects, among other prerequisites. Current InFusion-based products fall under the Foxboro, Wonderware, and Triconix brands, but there's a three-year roadmap to InFusion-enable all of the products in the company's Process Systems group.
Customers aren't waiting around, though. Given the newness of the enterprise control system concept, the early order activity is slightly surprising, but speaks to the fact that InFusion is clearly making its mark in manufacturing. -
This article originally appeared in the October issue of Managing Automation magazine.