A Whole New View

A Whole New View
Plant operations software vendors reinvent the user experience

Manufacturing Business Technology Supplement - "Enterprise Integration Gets Personal" - October 2006
Diverse paths to unified communication converge on the enterprise desktop, plant floor
By Roberto Michel, Senior Contributing Editor

One of the clear success stories surrounding manufacturers' use of IT is the proliferation of Windows-based human machine interface (HMI) software for supervising plant processes. Originally, HMIs were simple screens in isolated machines, but Windows-based supervisory control changed all that.

Thanks to Windows-based HMIs, plant-floor supervisors have better user interfaces (UI) for monitoring plant equipment and processes. And as Windows-centric industrial automation software vendors expanded solutions to cover higher-level plant execution, analytics, and portals, users adopted those products too. With Microsoft set to introduce Vista-its next-generation operating system-early next year, it's no surprise that plant-level vendors are looking to exploit that technology as well.

In particular, users can expect a move toward new zero-administration Window-based UIs that unite access to multiple applications, a further evolution of plant-intelligence portals, and at least one new HMI package optimized for Vista.

Russ Agrusa, president and CEO of ICONICS, a Web-enabled manufacturing-intelligence solutions supplier, says the company is re-architecting its GENESIS HMI for Vista.

Vista and Office System 2007 will make use of sharper 3D graphics, ribbon-style menus, enhanced security, and 64-bit computing. Agrusa says ICONICS GENESIS 64 is built for these new capabilities.

“We've redone our entire user interface to take advantage of Vista,” says Agrusa. “It's a quantum jump in the evolution of the HMI.”

Other vendors expect the industrial HMI market to be relatively slow in moving to Vista, though they are enthusiastic about the next generation of Microsoft's .NET infrastructure. Vendors say .NET now does a better job of supporting rich-client UIs that are relatively “thin” clients, while Microsoft's SharePoint portal continues to improve.

...

As for HMI packages themselves, vendors are testing products on Vista to ensure they will run properly, and evaluating capabilities in Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation, but only ICONICS is talking about a Vista-optimized HMI package ready by Vista's official launch date. Other vendors generally expect it will be a year or two before manufacturers are ready to change out operating systems on the plant floor.

ICONICS' Agrusa, however, is confident that HMIs optimized for Vista - and the look and feel of the next generation of Microsoft's applications - will catch on quickly, just as past breakthroughs did. “There is a reason we didn't stay with character-based UIs or monochrome monitors,” Agrusa points out. “You want to make the user experience clearer, faster, and more powerful.”

The next generation of Microsoft technology, however, goes beyond visual capabilities to include other infrastructure in the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX). Among these is Windows Workflow Foundation, or WF, a workflow subsystem for building workflow-enabled Windows applications.

...

Portal punch

...

SharePoint 2007, due out by early 2007, will have a service called the Business Data Catalog, or BDC, as well as another called Excel Services. The BDC is a metadata structure for linking up with business systems, while Excel Services allows portal-based use of Excel.

... Web Part technology initially was introduced by Microsoft to add discrete functions such as access to weather, flight information, or incoming email to SharePoint portals, but many third parties-including some of Microsoft's plant-focused partners-have built Web Parts to enable access to plant-trending data or analysis.

...

ICONICS Background Information

Founded in 1986, ICONICS is an award winning leader in the development of Web-enabled industrial automation and manufacturing intelligence software for Microsoft® Windows® operating systems. Our solutions are certified for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. ICONICS has successfully deployed more than 250,000 solutions in over 60 countries worldwide. Its solutions meet diverse customer needs in a variety of industries including Automotive, Building Management, Food & Beverage, Oil/Gas/Petrochemical, Machine Builders, Pharmaceutical/Biotech, Security, Water/Wastewater, Utilities, Government Infrastructures and more.

ICONICS’ corporate headquarters is located in Foxborough, Massachusetts (USA) near Boston. The company has offices throughout the United States, as well as in Australia, China, France, India, Italy, Germany, Netherlands and United Kingdom. ICONICS also has a joint software development and sales office in the Czech Republic.

© 2010 ICONICS, Inc. All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. GENESIS64, GENESIS32, Pocket GENESIS, BizViz and their respective modules, OPC-To-The-Core, and Visualize Your Enterprise are trademarks of ICONICS Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

A Whole New View Plant operations software vendors reinvent the user experience

ICONICS Background Information

A Whole New View
Plant operations software vendors reinvent the user experience