MES suite adds meaning to production data

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 17, 2005

The Ampla suite of manufacturing execution systems provide the means to achieve business interoperability, incremental cost reductions and improved productivity.

Citect has unveiled its Ampla suite of manufacturing execution systems (MES), providing manufacturing and utility industries with the means to achieve business interoperability, incremental cost reductions and improved productivity in their operations.

The result of 100-plus man-years of development, Ampla is an ISA-95 compliant, scalable suite of MES solutions, delivering real-time access to aggregated plant and business intelligence.

It allows key personnel to analyse and act on opportunities, to refine the workflow, maximise overall equipment effectiveness, and to correct problems before they impact the business.

Citect CEO, Richard Webb commented: "Customers are looking for the next generation of business improvement systems and Ampla fills that gap by delivering real-time business intelligence for prioritised decision-making".

"With Ampla, Citect is well positioned to leverage its strong installed Scada customer base worldwide, and to exploit these emerging trends".

A key benefit of Ampla is that it supports an ISA-95 compliant equipment hierarchy tree.

An appropriately structured equipment hierarchy facilitates integration with ERP and EAM systems, (which are on Level 4 of the ISA-95 hierarchy of activities covering business planning and logistics), as well as lower level systems.

Both SAP and Microsoft have announced support for the ISA-95 series of standards.

Ampla solutions enable organisations to control factors which drive their business by aligning and measuring production key performance indicators (KPIs), such as asset utilisation and overall equipment efficiencies, against business strategies.

The resulting real-time information removes guesswork and uncertainty, enabling key personnel to take prioritised action to deliver fast and incremental returns to their business.

Ampla systems are designed to gather data from all areas and data sources within an enterprise (ERP, Scada, LIM) - from the business level as well as the plant floor level, and provide real-time analysis of this data to drive continuous process improvements, cost reductions and improvements in productivity.

Ampla performs key tasks, such as data gathering across all levels of an enterprise, data analysis, and presentation of data in easily understandable formats, via a suite of performance modules; all of which are deployed to suit a company's specific business needs.

As each new module sits on the same single platform, Ampla MES solutions provide incremental value whilst lowering customers' total cost of ownership.

In addition, by leveraging open technologies - Ampla has an integrated OPC AE Client - and complementing existing automation and IT systems, they provide a low risk investment, with significant ROI being typically delivered in 6-12 months.

The Ampla modules target different aspects of the production system for improvement by focusing on specific aspects of the process, and automatically gathering information about it.

The data are then presented in a manner that makes it easy for management to clearly understand the main bottlenecks to production performance, causes of downtime and poor product quality.

At the same time, other Ampla modules can be targeting regulated needs such as traceability of batches, or specification conformance, while maintenance scheduling and cost management uses actual run-time data to reduce costs and improve operating efficiency.

Ampla solutions are deployed in a modular approach, enabling organisations to get the highest return in the shortest possible time.

Each module is tightly integrated with existing systems allowing companies to actively monitor, analyse, report and measure efficiencies in the key areas driving their business, whether they are production, quality, downtime or tracking.

Leveraging information from the combined modules, Ampla Metrics is a powerful, fully integrated diagnostics system, producing key performance indicators (KPI) for analysis and measurement.