What’s hiding inside your mountains of shop floor data, quality lab data, and maintenance data? There’s likely valuable information hiding in your plant’s data warehouse. There are different tools you can use to analyze data, but none offer the same cost-efficient and quick identification and quantification of process variability like Process Monitor.
I attended the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) 2019 Spring Meeting in New Orleans a few weeks ago. Once again, the big topic this year was Big Data Analytics, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things (IoT) in Modern Manufacturing.
My colleagues Bob Hopkins and John Scheible were presenters this year, and I was able to introduce them for their talk about Process Monitor, the best-in-class application for real-time, big-data analytics of shop floor manufacturing data. It was one of the best attended and talked-about presentations at the conference, generating a lot of interest in Process Monitor.
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Compared to similar offerings from the big names in factory automation, Process Monitor is much easier and less expensive to implement. In addition, its lean, fast architecture provides near-instantaneous data visualizations, drill-downs, and high-level analytics.
Process Monitor, the Original Big Data App
There’s a good reason that Process Monitor stands up well against the competition. It’s been around for a long time. In the Process Monitor story, necessity was indeed the mother of invention.
Back in the late 1980s, two young engineers at Kodak developed a new tool, designed to sift through mountains of process data coming in from the shop floor, condense it down to a critical few KPIs, and display them 24/7, control chart style, right in the control room. This turned every operator into a deputy data scientist, long before the term became the buzzword it is today. It also made Kodak a world leader in predictive and reliability-centered maintenance.
By the early 90s it had become indispensable in Kodak control rooms around the world, and they received a patent for it in 1991.
By 2004, it was clear that digital photography would all but eliminate film, so Kodak was looking for other revenue streams. Process Monitor was a valuable piece of intellectual property, so Kodak pitched it to Wonderware to see what they thought … Wonderware loved it, and wanted to market it to their customers, but before a licensing deal could be finalized, Kodak management had a change of heart and postponed the deal … until now.
Optimation, Process Monitor and IIoT
Bob Hopkins and John Scheible, the 2 young engineers who started it all, aren’t quite so young anymore, but they never lost their passion for chemical engineering, big data analytics, and cutting-edge application development. Process Monitor has been kept lean, fast, and fully compatible with current big data frameworks and remote/cloud computing systems.
And now, Optimation is fully licensed to implement this best-in-class data management, visualization, and analysis tool at industrial sites worldwide.
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