At its User Summit: Making the Industrial Internet Real, in Orlando, Florida, GE’s Intelligent Platforms business (NYSE: GE) announced the launch of a new version of the Proficy Monitoring & Analysis Suite (PMAS), which integrates its industrial data historian, Proficy Historian with its advanced analytics capabilities, Proficy SmartSignal. The new offering also utilizes GE’s Predix platform for the Industrial Internet.
PMAS is an end-to-end solution that uses Proficy Historian to collect organize, store, visualize and analyze data, and Advanced Analytics software based on Proficy SmartSignal to improve both asset health and process performance by providing the earliest detection of emerging equipment failure, often weeks to months ahead of other technologies.
“The Industrial Internet is all about intelligent machines, advanced analytics, and people at work, coming together to solve problems as never before,” said Brian Courtney, General Manager of GE’s Industrial Data Intelligence product group. “It’s about gathering much more data, Industrial Big Data, more efficiently and over longer periods of time, using Advanced Analytics to interpret this data in more meaningful ways. PMAS brings this to life to help customers collect, organize, and analyze equipment and process data to maximize productive output and lower operating costs, with fast payback and low risk.”
Because it is fully integrated, PMAS reduces implementation costs and time-to-benefit. And, because it has been proven through years of use in GE monitoring centers, it reduces risk. In addition, GE offers full implementation, monitoring and maintenances services from GE equipment and software experts so PMAS can be used by any company, regardless of level of IT and engineering expertise.
The core technologies in the PMAS 2.0 suite are:
Proficy Historian provides a distributed architecture, central management and administration, low storage costs, and a wide range of industry-standard interfaces. Proven through tens of thousands of installs around the world, storing hundreds of millions of tags of information, Historian provides the backbone of PMAS.
Historian is seamless and provides scalability from embedded technology in the control and SCADA layers, to site and enterprise scale with Distributed Historian Services, to a cloud-based Industrial Big Data solution based on Hadoop technologies. The software improves performance by handling data sampling down to the micro-second and storing full-fidelity data 85% more efficiently than standard relational databases. And its built-in compression algorithms reduce the cost of storage.
Historian ensures availability of data by providing collector redundancy, active redundancy, and caching capabilities. It allows users to look at data in context in multiple ways, depending upon how you want to analyze it. Historian also has industry leading data-management capabilities, leveraging data stores to allow users to compartmentalize data to set governance, retention, security, and quality policies with fine-grain control. Historian also supports user-defined collector expressions, which enable data cleansing, conversion, and computation at the point of collection. The same expressions can be used during visualization and analysis without requiring tag consumption, greatly reducing costs while maximizing capability.
Proficy SmartSignal: PMAS offers two types of Advanced Analytics capabilities—Asset Analytics to improve asset health, and Process Analytics to improve and optimize processes. All Advanced Analytics software is fully integrated with GE’s Industrial Data Management software, providing full advanced-analysis capabilities. Proficy SmartSignal improves asset health by providing the earliest detection of emerging equipment failure, often weeks to months ahead of other technologies. This patent-protected software helps detect and fix emerging issues before they become large problems. SmartSignal helps avoid catastrophic equipment failure, process upsets, and unplanned outages—and even helps approach zero unplanned downtime.
With SmartSignal, users can maximize revenue by improving reliability and availability, reduce maintenance costs by replacing reactive maintenance with less expensive proactive maintenance, reduce maintenance frequency and duration by fixing only the equipment that needs to be fixed, reduce replacement costs by ordering parts at notification of an impending problem, not later during an emergency, extend asset life by fixing problems before they get serious, and even reduce energy costs by running equipment more efficiently. SmartSignal works on any equipment from any OEM in any service—any piece of equipment that’s critical to production.
The software detects the broadest range of equipment problems across the widest variety of assets, load ranges, and failure modes. GE is currently using it to protect over 15,000 assets in the Power Generation, Oil & Gas, Mining, Aviation, and other industries.
Proficy CSense: GE’s Process Analytics software, Proficy CSense, provides deeper insight on process performance. It improves and optimizes processes by providing powerful analytical tools that use leading-edge techniques to extract knowledge from existing historical process and manufacturing plant data. CSense helps to identify causes for production problems, along with opportunities for preventing these problems in the future. This software can be used for batch and discrete processes, as well as continuous processes and helps to increase yield, while reducing variability.
Performance and Monitoring Services: Located outside of Chicago, Illinois, GE’s Industrial Performance & Reliability Center (IPRC) provides full monitoring services to customers who have constrained resources but need to avoid catastrophic equipment failure, process upsets, unplanned outages, and unplanned downtime. The IPRC uses PMAS software along with deep subject-matter expertise to provide Predictive Diagnostic Advisories on emerging equipment and process problems. The IPRC currently monitors equipment globally for customers in the Power Generation, Oil & Gas, Mining, and Aviation industries—more than 5,500 assets.
PMAS seamlessly integrates the cases generated by the IPRC with onsite data in Proficy Knowledge Center (PKC). PKC provides asset-centric views for an entire fleet of assets. It connects the predictive-analytic cases with onsite tools that allow users to build standard diagnostic procedures in order to institutionalize the processes around diagnostics for industrial equipment failures. This standardization reduces time-to diagnose, ensures consistency in execution, and provides a mechanism to institutionalize diagnostic knowledge into a stepwise procedure that even novices can support.
“The real power and uniqueness of PMAS is its ability to provide the foresight of asset failures months before they become major issues with the insight tools needed to diagnose the root cause of failures in time to take action,” continued Courtney. “This allows users to perform timely and cost effective maintenance action. It also allows customers to institutionalize knowledge to create standard diagnostic procedures to drive learning and consistency ensuring they capture best practices for timely action.”
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