Chicago, IL -ABB, Accenture, Intel Corporation and Microsoft announced during the March 3-6 National Manufacturing Week an alliance designed to help manufacturers bridge the gap between plant floor operations and enterprise IT systems.
Chicago, IL – ABB , Accenture , Intel Corporation and Microsoft announced during the March 3-6 National Manufacturing Week an alliance designed to help manufacturers bridge the gap between plant floor operations and enterprise IT systems. The Industrial IT alliance aims to help manufacturers by simplifying integration, gaining greater visibility into their businesses, making informed, real-time business decisions, and enhancing financial performance.
The four companies will provide a full range of computing diagnostics, solution design, development, and integration services for manufacturers. The team’s joint development work will help customers gain access to manufacturing automation technology designed to work seamlessly in a plant environment and integrate with a wide collection of enterprise IT systems.
”Removing the barriers to real-time data synchronization must be part of the overall business equation for collaborative manufacturing,” said Larry O’Brien, director of process industry research for ARC Advisory Group (Dedham, MA). ”Today, no single company can do this across the enterprise. To achieve this in a way that yields a common direction for manufacturers requires the combined efforts of strong companies such as those included in the Industrial IT alliance.”
The collective resources of the alliance partners bring automation and power products, manufacturing solution expertise, robust computing and networking, and program management and integration skills together to support an open architecture for enterprise solutions.
Industrial IT provides the foundation
Within ABB’s Industrial IT, a dynamic software shell called an ”Aspect Object” represents each element within the plant-including equipment, raw material, and finished goods.
Accenture designed and built an integration layer that is based on Industrial IT and the Microsoft BizTalk Server to help enable the real-time exchange of data between the enterprise and plant floor systems. Within the alliance, Accenture also will serve as the program manager to help clients with diagnostics, solution delivery, hosting, and large-scale systems integration. Intel brings standards-based, high-performance microprocessing technologies and computing platforms to the alliance.
Intel Architecture enables modular IT infrastructure that mixes wired and wireless communications capabilities with open and scalable Intel-based servers, networks and storage to generate lower operation costs and increased flexibility.
The addition of Microsoft .NET technologies helps ensure customers more easily integrate diverse legacy systems and business processes with current and future technologies. Microsoft’s enterprise technologies and products also provide manufacturers greater visibility into the enterprise, making it possible to optimize and automate business processes with a faster time to benefit and lower cost of ownership than with other enterprise IT systems.
The alliance will also provide development, consulting and solution support to major application providers and independent software vendors to help develop and replicate applications that leverage the Industrial IT architecture and companion technologies from Accenture, Intel and Microsoft.
Control Engineering Daily News Desk
Dave Harrold, Senior Editor
[email protected]
Intel Corporation and Mitsubishi Electric are CSIA members as of 3/5/2015