GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms , a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, has announced advanced analytics solutions for its software portfolio that are designed to maximize the information that already exists in production operations, extract knowledge from that information and identify the opportunities to solve potential production issues before they impact the process. The introductions of Proficy Troubleshooter and Proficy Cause+, the updated release of Proficy Historian version 3.5, and the market leadership position of Proficy’s HMI/SCADA products combine to provide companies with unprecedented intelligence they can use to enhance process performance.
This powerful combination of solutions enables:
- better understanding of the causes of variation and problems in the process as well as the real-time impact of the process on production assets
- learning the relationships between disconnected data, extracting knowledge and building business cases with benefit estimations
- preventing unnecessary conventional ‘alarm bursts’ with more intelligent alarms that work in multivariate space, indicating causes of problems and providing corrective actions
- expert knowledge capture for making modelling and expert system technology available to all users.
“Everyone not only needs some method for archiving plant data and a system for supervisory control and data acquisition, but also an effective way of doing rapid process troubleshooting and other continuous improvement initiatives utilizing its real-time plant data,” said John Leppiaho, Product General Manager for GE Fanuc’s Operations Management Software. “GE Fanuc’s Proficy Historian is already proven in industries all over the world for collecting, storing and retrieving mission-critical data. The addition of Proficy Troubleshooter and Proficy Cause+ gives users advanced analytics and control of their processes to drive operational excellence.”
These solutions provide essentially a three-step process for advanced analysis starting with Proficy Historian 3.5, a powerful plant-wide data historian that collects, archives and distributes tremendous volumes of real-time plant floor process information at extremely high speeds. Built specifically for production and process data acquisition and presentation, Proficy Historian enables users to leverage increased process visibility for better and faster decisions, increased productivity and reduced costs. Proficy Historian is built to store, and more importantly, retrieve production/process data in the way companies need it. This capability enables better responsiveness by quickly providing the granularity of data needed to analyze and solve intense process applications.
The second component of the advanced analytics process is the new Proficy Troubleshooter product. Proficy Troubleshooter is an off-line, value-add product to Proficy Historian that analyzes process variation. It is used to identify causes for production problems and identify the opportunity for preventing these problems in the future. Proficy Troubleshooter acts as a bridge between Proficy Historian and Proficy HMI/SCADA obtaining relationships between process variables and preparing benefit estimations for real-time deployment.
Proficy Troubleshooter packs powerful multivariate modeling and data-mining techniques, which is appealing to a broad user base of historian users and process engineers. It does not require a background in advanced statistics or modeling. It also provides a clear path to real-time solutions for the user – deploying insights as a real-time intelligent monitoring and advisory solution in Proficy Cause+, with outputs displayed in Proficy HMI/SCADA and web-based reporting.