Siemens Licenses Technology to Launch Industrial E-service Business
Siemens Industry, Inc., Solutions, Automation & Drive Technologies' e-business service will first target process industries such as food and beverage, metals, oil and gas, petro-chemical, and pulp and paper. It also will be expanded into other remote monitoring and diagnostic applications, such as electric utility transmission networks.
As part of the agreement, ei3 will work with Siemens to develop a customer "Command Center" by January 2001. The center, to be located near the Siemens headquarters in Alpharetta, GA, will offer around-the-clock delivery of industrial e-services using ei3's Virtual Private Network technology for direct connection to customer plants. The center will be staffed with a team of Siemens engineers, technicians, and application experts.
Together with Siemens Westinghouse Technical Services' field-based operations around the United States, the Command Center will support customers in the areas of process improvement, emergency breakdowns, and asset condition monitoring.
"The alliance with ei3 will provide us with tools to instantly bring the engineering expertise of Siemens to customer plants, helping to boost their performance and competitiveness," says Mike McCarthy, VP of Siemens Westinghouse Technical Services, a Siemens Energy & Automation business. "These e-service tools will play an important role in our total life cycle service offerings for industrial plants."
Connecting to the manufacturing floor
Through a high-speed network, ei3's backbone technology will connect the Siemens Command Center team to a customer's manufacturing floor where it can track the operating data of various sensors, controllers, monitoring devices, and application software.
With access to a customer's process line performance and asset productivity, Siemens engineers can obtain insight into system and component-level problems and emergencies to efficiently resolve them and prevent further reoccurrence. They also will be able to analyze operating statistics and make recommendations to improve productivity and increase output. Moreover, the connection to the Siemens Command Center gives the customer 24/7 access to a reliable source for solving emergency procurement problems.
The connection also allows customers anytime-anywhere secure Internet access to their current operating data so that they can keep informed of recent events, actions, changes and system backups logged. In addition, the link to the Command Center can be part of a company's enterprise-wide, data-access solution for multi-sited facilities.
The technology portfolio of ei3 also includes applications for predictive maintenance, and complete post-change and scheduled backups for off-site protection of a customer's system software.
"ei3 technology will give us a real-time window into the critical sensor data and process variable information of a customer's operation," McCarthy says. "Combined with our industrial services expertise and manufacturing process know-how, we plan to use this window as part of a solution that reduces downtime, cuts maintenance costs, and extends the productive life of a customer's plant."
Edited by Jim Lardear
Managing Editor, PlantAutomation.com
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