The new InFusion enterprise control system is said to combine industry-leading capabilities from across Invensys with advanced enterprise information and integration technologies from both Microsoft and SAP to dramatically reduce integration costs. With InFusion technology, most existing plant floor and enterprise systems can now be cost-effectively integrated into a common system, says Invensys. In conjunction with a suite of new performance services, Invensys's InFusion system will help manufacturers more effectively align plant operations and maintenance departments with the business to optimize overall asset performance management.
These, says Invensys, are the capabilities designed into InFusion that have not been previously available from any single automation or information system:
•Unprecedented integration across virtually all existing plant floor systems, subsystems, and intelligent field devices, regardless of vendor or protocol
•Low-cost, standards-based information interoperability between plant floor, manufacturing execution (MES), and enterprise systems.
• A unified engineering and support environment across both plant floor and MES systems, plus a powerful application object model that simplifies the creation and re-use of innovative new equipment-, unit-, and plant-level strategies, while dramatically improving engineering productivity.
InFusion reduces the cost and effort required to integrate intelligent plant floor devices and systems via standards such as OPC and an unmatched portfolio of device drivers. Process control, MES, and even ERP applications can be brought together into a common data model and a common best-in-class HMI to deliver timely, in-context information to all plant personnel.
Is this new product offering, as Invensys suggests, a step change in the utilization of open technologies and standards in a fully industrial system? Will it, as Invensys predicts, help customers finally break down stubborn technical and organizational barriers while preserving and extending their equity in existing automation assets? Greg Gorbach, vice president of collaborative manufacturing research at ARC Advisory Group, thinks it has promise.
"Maximizing the performance of your manufacturing assets," says Gorbach, "requires a two-pronged strategy: first, utilize real-time information from every area and plant to inform people and your business systems; and second, provide a dynamic feedback mechanism to allow you to swiftly respond to changes to optimize business performance throughout the enterprise. This new Invensys product is designed to work with existing enterprise and plant systems (Invensys or otherwise) to enable this strategy. The ultimate goal is to provide closed-loop control for your business processes. We at ARC believe this is what manufacturers are looking for."
InFusion uses key technologies and standards such as Microsoft.NET and
BizTalk Server 2004, SAP NetWeaver and xMII, ISA S95 (for manufacturing-to enterprise integration), and OPC (for real-time connectivity). InFusion also represents the first major implementation of Open O&M (Operations & Maintenance), the industry-standard convergence of OPC, ISA S95, and MIMOSA.
