Pinpointing profit and loss during the production process
When Invensys Process Systems (IPS) introduced InFusion in April 2006, part of the introduction involved a promise to provide seamless integration and data exchange from InFusion to SAP. Over 90percent of IPS customers in the process industry use SAP as an ERP system and therefore IPS has focused its activities in this area by working closely with SAP.
ERP systems today are transaction based and manage all business-related data exchange in many departments, functions and corporate headquarters. Transaction-based data is used in the monthly reporting cycle. In a typical chemical company, IPS works closely with production planning and in the real-time management of data related to a production plant.
In this context, ‘real-time’ refers to measurement data, control data, alarm situations and events, and is defined by a time less than one second. In a typical use of ERP, data from production facilities are consolidated over hours, shifts and days into monthly data. Production costs such as material use, utility cost and produced goods are handled in the InFusion system and then reported into the ERP system.
In the chemical industry, most production plants use applications between the real-time automation of their production plants and the ERP system to consolidate data, to correct measured values, and to fulfil their reporting needs. InFusion is now capable of standardising all data management applications in real-time automation with standard functions. These functions are created with application objects, which interface with the ERP.
In October 2006 IPS announced SAP Netweaver certification. Since then, Invensys and SAP have undertaken a co-innovation programme, which has included designing and building packaged composite applications (PCAs). IPS designed a PCA for process plants called Real-time Finance, which was certified by SAP in March 2007. It combines InFusion real-time accounting with elements of real-time finance.
A PCA is the basis for a solution to become an SAP Endorsed Business Solution (EBS). As an EBS, IPS is certified to implement and sell SAP software products to customers. The Real-Time Finance PCA is certified based on the xMII (Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence) product from SAP. xMII allows integration to the plant floor and associated support systems as well as connection to the Enterprise layer (Fig.1).
Limited financial visibility
One of the value propositions at the launch of InFusion was to address the lack of information clarity to senior executives in the process industry.
“There is limited financial visibility from the manufacturing part of the business,” explained Hartmut Wallraf, chief technology officer IPS EMEA. “Top-level executives have a lack of understanding as to which areas of a production plant are in a profit and which are running at a loss. In addition, the time it takes to record less than daily activities in the plant into the monthly reporting cycle requires improvements. With InFusion and our relationship with SAP, our aim is to provide a solution to these problems.”
To achieve the certification requirements of SAP, IPS developed a demonstration application in its own SAP software environment, focusing on contribution margins from a simulated process plant and including variable costs.
All the data produced in the simulation is transferred to the enterprise system – IPS’s own SAP system. Real-time connection is simulated along with the use of real-time data in the reporting environment of SAP.
The Real-time Finance PCA is connected to the xMII which is then tied into the SAP ERP environment in the SAP/R3 product, where it interfaces with modules such as finance, production planning, plant maintenance, quality management and health and safety.
It enables a customer to plan work orders, check production and human resources, run manufacturing schedules, release work orders, close orders, and implement shipping and logistics.
Furthermore, it enables direct reporting of real-time events and alerts, order status, charge rates, life of inventory, yields, completions and usage, start and stop times, quality and lab data, process history, best practice deviations, efficiency, downtime tracking, and rework scrap rates.
“Basically Real-time Finance simplifies the exchange of data between InFusion and SAP,” adds Wallraf. “In the past, experts with detailed knowledge of the SAP infrastructure had to develop specific business application process interfaces to facilitate data exchange. Now, thanks to the integration of Real-time Finance and xMII, it is much easier and quicker to define the data links between the Industry SQL in the InFusion History Engine and the associated data tables in the SAP/R3 modules. It’s as easy as working with Excel tables.”
With Real-time Finance, IPS provides a single application to manage production data across traditionally separate domains. It enables customers to align their business objectives and processes with manufacturing operation processes, and increases customer responsiveness and agility for completing the real-time demand and supply chain. It also optimises customer production scheduling and execution and provides improved customer service and satisfaction due to real-time order status and production consistency.
The bottom line, says the company, is increased visibility between plant and enterprise and an intelligent foundation for business optimisation.
Condition management
IPS has also just launched InFusion Condition Manager version 2.2, which collects and analyses real-time diagnostics from plant production assets, drives the appropriate actions, and now also shares that information with plant databases and HMIs.
Invensys’ InFusion Condition Manager is a real-time asset condition management component for the company's InFusion enterprise control system (ECS) and other platforms. It collects real-time condition data from a broad range of plant data sources, analyses and contextualises the data, and then triggers and manages the appropriate operations, engineering, or maintenance actions.
Other vendors’ condition monitoring solutions tend to focus on basic monitoring of field devices and/or rotating equipment.
In contrast, InFusion Condition Manager collects, aggregates, and analyses real-time data from the full array of plant production assets, including (but not limited to) sensors and actuators, pumps, motors, compressors, turbines, dryers, and heat exchangers; and even entire process units.
The InFusion Condition Manager interoperates with all Invensys and third-party applications supported through the InFusion application environment.
Thanks to recent version 2.2 enhancements, equipment condition and maintenance information can now also easily be displayed on plant process control and engineering HMI workstations. This information was previously only available on Invensys’ own Avantis.PRO enterprise asset management (EAM) system or other computerised maintenance management systems.
The InFusion Condition Manager can now also feed data to a variety of different plant Historian packages to allow the data and actions to be historised and made available to other plant and enterprise systems.
And to more easily facilitate bulk deployment throughout industrial plants with a large number and diversity of production assets, the enhanced InFusion Condition Manager offers improved template capabilities. These templates save time and drive best practices.
“Our InFusion Condition Manager provides a powerful toolset that can enable industrial plants to avoid unnecessary maintenance and downtime via predictive, reliability-cantered maintenance and operations to help improve overall asset performance management,” commented Isauro Martinez-Cairo, director of Avantis product strategy at Invensys Process Systems.
