A series of software modules, that can stand alone or form a seamless suite of manufacturing management tools, bridge the gap between betweenautomation systems and business management.
A series of software modules, that can stand alone or form a seamlessly integrated suite of manufacturing management tools, bridge the gap between factory level automation systems and business management systems. Rockwell Automation introduces Plant Intelligence in a Box, a cost effective solution to analyse plant performance provided by a suite of fully functional Rockwell Software Manufacturing Businessware (RSBizware) pre-configured on a powerful, rugged Allen-Bradley industrial computer. RSBizware is a series of software modules that can stand alone or form a seamlessly integrated suite of manufacturing management tools that bridge the gap between factory level automation systems and business management systems.

Plant Automation in a Box is an easy to use, entry level system that enables manufacturers to make rapid improvements in plant performance and so see a quick return on their investment.

It uses raw manufacturing data collected from automation systems to produce usable reports on plant performance, and measure, monitor and improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), a key indicator of efficiency and productivity.

Pre-installed software modules include: RSBizware Historian, the complete solution for collecting, analysing, viewing and reporting data; RSSql, a powerful bi-directional transaction manager for handling the flow of data to and from standard databases; RSBizware PlantMetrics, a powerful yet simple set of tools to analyse the performance of production assets.

'Our aim with Plant Intelligence in a Box is to provide customers with a low cost means of seeing for themselves the tangible gains in efficiency RSBizware offers,' says Mike Croot, software manager at Rockwell Automation.

'It is not just demonstration software that expires after 30 days but a fully functioning, scalable software suite that can be expanded to cover a whole plant.' To ensure manufacturers obtain maximum benefit from the system, the highly cost-effective package includes installation and configuration by a Rockwell Automation engineer.

Plant Intelligence in a Box has been designed to overcome a widespread reluctance to invest in large, complex manufacturing execution systems (MES), which often involves a substantial upfront investment with long and uncertain payback periods.

These traditional MES have simply been seen as intermediate software layers sitting above a SCADA system, acting as repositories for production data such as manufacturing instruction sets.

But such MES are inflexible, offer limited functionality and cannot provide the integration with higher level ERP systems needed to bind the factory floor to the rest of the supply chain.

'As a result, manufacturers have been reluctant to embrace MES, either as a concept or a set of tools,' says Croot.

'Many manufacturers are data rich but information poor, in that they aren't able to extract meaningful information on plant performance from the wealth of production data generated by modern automation systems.' Even companies with high level enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have often been unable to link them directly to the factory floor, leaving management to base strategic decisions on data that is out of date, inaccurate and incomplete.

RSBizware software overcomes these problems, providing seamless integration between the plant and most leading ERP systems and enabling companies without ERP to collect, analyse and report manufacturing data.

It includes database software to collate and store manufacturing data, a transaction manager to handle the flow of data, analysis tools that enable the database to be 'mined' down to individual device level and report generators that produce detailed yet usable information on plant metrics.

Plant Intelligence in a Box provides manufacturers with a risk-free entry into MES, enabling them to see rapid returns on a limited investment before rolling out RSBizware to other machines or production lines within a plant.