Performance management: .Net-based platform collaboration

Activplant

, a provider of performance management solutions, has released a new version of its ActivEssentials solution: ActivEssentials 5. The technology suite incorporates powerful, scalable, and flexible components that work together to increase functionality and identify waste and operational inefficiencies that directly affect a company’s bottom line. Aimed at high-volume, high-automation plants, it consolidates plant floor data into relevant real-time and historical information, enabling productivity gains by optimizing product, people, equipment, and processes. Plant managers and manufacturing executives can focus on key issues in their facilities that ultimately improve product quality, accelerate new product launches, and drive performance gains.

ActivEssentials 5 reduces ad hoc interconnections between tools by interposing an open core foundation able to communicate one-on-one with each of them, accepting new data directly from any source, then relaying it directly to the intended recipients. Adding or changing a tool affects only one interconnection—the one to the core.

Says Chuck Frosst, president of Activplant, “With this latest upgrade, we leverage open and interoperable architecture to ensure manufacturers have the right technology to harness plant floor information and advance their performance management initiatives.”

The company says its product’s openness and interoperability, built on the Microsoft .Net framework with a services-oriented architecture (SOA) model, leverages powerful Web services to deliver a complete set of tools for lean program enablement to help manufacturers make efficiency improvements that positively affect the bottom line and keep user companies competitive.

Activplant’s patented universal factory data model (UFDM) is at the ActivEssentials 5 core. It removes data analysis complexity by collecting and categorizing data in a standardized format. The software incorporates real-time data from the plant floor and packages it in actionable reports. Areas of focus for this latest upgrade included improving enterprise capabilities in data management, consolidation of data and improved security, and additional performance and general quality improvements.

With new tools like the Query Builder, users have access to drag-and-drop query creation from the Activplant database and the ability to share this XML data with external software. By leveraging third party services, ActivEssentials 5 delivers traditional Activplant reports and introduces the ability to create them in the fully incorporated Microsoft reporting services.

—Edited by C. G. Masi , Control Engineering senior editor

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