- Enterprise solutions feature mobility and remote management, rapid application development and industrial data management
- Portfolio-wide visualization and configuration drives industrial digital transformation, supporting Lean and optimization
- Hybrid cloud approach leverages advanced technologies to reduce costs, increase performance and meet both business and operational data needs
SAN RAMON, Calif. – October 14, 2020 – GE Digital today announced significant enhancements to four of its key Digital Plant software applications: Proficy Operations Hub 2.0, Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX 6.5, Proficy Historian 9.0, and Proficy Plant Applications 8.2.
“Today’s digital plant and its connected workforce accelerate and sustain continuous improvement to drive greater productivity and efficiency, lower total cost of ownership, and increase profitability,” said Richard Kenedi, General Manager of GE Digital’s Digital Plant business. “Our mission-critical software accelerates digitization by supporting digital workers as a critical part of infrastructure modernization, enterprise visibility and scalability, and continuous improvement programs such as Lean.”
Proficy Operations Hub 2.0 provides common visualization and configuration across the GE Digital Proficy software portfolio of HMI/SCADA, MES, data management, and analytics. This state-of-the-art software is a remote operations enabler featuring tighter integration with the Proficy portfolio, including flagship HMI/SCADA software, iFIX and CIMPLICITY as well as Proficy Plant Applications, Proficy Historian, Proficy Batch Execution, Proficy CSense, and a new sensor health intelligent app.
“Proficy Operations Hub is designed for the modern industrial worker, focusing on user centric information across systems and available everywhere from home to control room” said Andrew Hughes, Principal Analyst, LNS Research. “The more useful the information you give to people throughout the organization, the more value and optimization you’ll get through your systems. Comprehensive access to information motivates people. Using Proficy Operations Hub as an operations visualization and configuration environment – including across multiple plants – will bring measurable benefits.”
Among the benefits industrial companies can realize by using Proficy Operations Hub 2.0 are:
- 60% faster configuration with enhanced ease of use
- 40% enhanced data analysis capabilities including ease-of-use enhancements, new widgets and enhanced Trend Analysis Widget
- 100% improved performance including Query interface enhancements and Data Distributor enhancements
- 333% increased scale on a single server with up to 1,000 Concurrent Clients on a single server
“Proficy Operations Hub accelerated time to value as we developed and delivered an expanded remote and local monitoring and control solution for ENGIE, a major energy company serving millions of customers,” said Sven Simons, Manager, Industrial IT Business Unit, Control & Protection Automation nv. “We leveraged this highly flexible software including Rapid Application Development capabilities in conjunction with the Proficy portfolio to create reusable objects and High Performance HMI operator screens, GIS functionality, dashboards, and more.”
Major enhancements to GE Digital’s iFIX 6.5 include web-based build and configuration through an updated configuration UX, reducing costs and speeding time to value. This Proficy HMI/SCADA solution increases usability and allows faster identification of relevant screens for alarms through improved web-based build and configuration with support for the tags and alarms data structure in the PLC, model support through templates and object types, and a web-based database manager. This facilitates smarter operator decisions and can result in a 35% improvement in alarm resolution.
Proficy Historian 9.0 upgrades include Remote Collector Management (w/ UX), an Enterprise Management tool, a collector install simplification and configuration tool, ability to be an OPC-UA Server and Azure IoT Hub end point, and horizontal scalability. The combination of Proficy Historian and Proficy Operations Hub provides a powerful data management solution with asset model context and visualization.
In addition, Proficy Plant Applications 8.2, a powerful operations management solution for process, discrete and mixed manufacturing environments spanning industrials from Food & Beverage/Consumer Packaged Goods and Pharmaceutical to Aviation and Electronics, supports the digital worker with more “mobile first” UIs for Waste and Process Orders as well as discrete and hybrid assembly UIs. Proficy Plant Applications 8.2 increases the solution’s enterprise scalability, allowing up to 300 active users with a development path for another increase coming soon. Version 8.2 features modernized clients with Web Activities Embedded SPC, Web Variable e-Signature, Web Process Order v2, unbound process orders, common History and BOM integration, Web BOM Management User Interface, and a Receiving Inspection Module. This new version offers innovation that drives toward Zero Downtime upgrades with new Flash Upgrades, B2MML v3, Unicode Support and Step-wise Activities based on Titles.
Across the portfolio, GE Digital offers a hybrid on-premise / cloud approach, leveraging the best of both worlds to balance the needs of the plant floor with the advantage of cloud technologies.
“With a hybrid on-premise/cloud Manufacturing Execution System (MES), operations happen on premise, and analytics and optimization tools are applied only to the required subset of the data in the cloud,” continued GE Digital’s Kenedi. “This is an excellent use of the cloud because it does not pose risk to production yet utilizes the cloud to help reduce the hardware footprint. Costs related to resources to maintain huge databases, such as day-to-day staff as well as the costs of downtime incurred with software upgrades, are reduced while performance increases.”
GE Digital will be announcing additional new product releases in its Proficy portfolio in Q4 and Q1 including CIMPLICITY HMI/SCADA 11.1, Proficy CSense 8.0, Sensor Health, and Manufacturing Data Cloud 1.4.
GE Digital’s Digital Plant solutions are generally available. More information can be found here.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Ellie HolmanProduct & Technology Communications
GE Digital
[email protected]
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