The Rlink interface used by PolyOne Corp. is part of a suite of products known as the Real-time Performance Management (RtPM) platform, announced by OSIsoft Inc., San Leandro, Calif., in May. It is one of various tools and products that have been developed around OSIsoft’s flagship PI System data historian product over the years that can help companies more effectively gather data and monitor events in real time across local and global operations, the company says.
Real-time Performance Management, when abbreviated as RPM, is a term championed by ARC Advisory Group, a Dedham, Mass., research and consulting firm. RPM is a growing focus for more manufacturers.
“Companies in the past used to develop a plan and then try to manufacture to that plan, and they would only measure the results of the plan at the end of the month,” says Tom Fiske, an ARC research director. “But that’s not good enough any more. Manufacturers really need to manage their plants in real time. And that takes bringing in a multitude of informational sources, contextualizing that information, and putting it into a form that people can immediately act upon to make better decisions to improve performance and profitability.”
OSIsoft’s Rlink interface product has been certified since 1996 for use in transferring production data to the PP-PI (Production Planning-Process Industries) application module of the SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, says Gretchen Schwenzer, OSIsoft director of ERP integration. Rlink subsequently received SAP certification for the transfer of quality data to SAP QM (Quality Management) and maintenance data to SAP PM (Preventive Maintenance) in 1999 and 2000 respectively, Schwenzer adds.
OSIsoft in May this year announced agreements to provide Rlink connections for maintenance data transfer to three additional vendors’ products: Maximo, from MRO Software; OneWorld from J.D. Edwards (recently acquired by Peoplesoft); and Passport, from Indus. But so far, according to Schwenzer, OSIsoft has encountered difficulty in making the links for Rlink transfers of production data to non-SAP enterprise resource planning systems. “SAP put out a specified interface [for production data transfer], but most the other ERP vendors do not have a clearly defined place where you can send that production data,” she explains. “So that is requiring more investigation.”
Other components of OSIsoft’s RtPM platform include tools and products that work with the PI architecture to collect, store and perform calculations on data from multiple sources for presentation to higher-level enterprise systems. One of the latest RtPM components is the RtPortal, announced in October, for the Web-based presentation and visualization of real-time factory and enterprise data. “The main flavor that we offer is based on the Microsoft SharePoint portal, but we are also giving people the option for the same set of tools using the SAP portal,” Schwenzer says.
See story that goes with this sidebar:Feeding the ERP Beast
