Invensys Operations Management unveils new approach

Against the unexpected backdrop of rising attendance at this year’s OpsManage conference in Anaheim, CA (November 3-5, 2009)—overall attendance is said to have increased 9% this year versus last—the major theme was the company’s focus on new business drivers in the manufacturing market.

December 1, 2009

 

Sudipta Bhattacharya, president and CEO, Invensys Operations Management

Against the unexpected backdrop of rising attendance at this year’s OpsManage conference in Anaheim, CA (November 3-5, 2009)—overall attendance is said to have increased 9% this year versus last—the major theme was the company’s focus on new business drivers in the manufacturing market. According to Sudipta Bhattacharya, president and CEO of Invensys Operations Management, these drivers are: environmental excellence, production excellence, asset excellence, and control/safety excellence.

“Five years ago, the only thing that really mattered was production optimization,” said Bhattacharya. Today, several issues play a key role.

“Having knowledge of the environmental impacts of production without being able to address them properly can become a bottleneck to manufacturing,” he said. “In addition, the definition of production has changed. It’s no longer just about the cost of materials and labor, now it has to do with real time adaptability to customer orders—am I capable of producing to customer demands? And asset management now includes people as well as capital equipment, as companies strive to maintain worker expertise. As a result, plant control is now just as much about business control as it is about controlling production.”

In response to these changes, Bhattacharya noted that Invensys Operations Management (the moniker for the new Invensys business unit that incorporates IMServe, Invensys Process Systems, Wonderware, and Eurotherm) has shifted its focus. Now the company stresses the issues of addressing control and safety, as well as simulation, optimization, and execution more so than it does a specific product-oriented strategy.

A series of articles reporting on this conference can be accessed at: https://tinyurl.com/yefzsqe .