A long-awaited (by me, at least) software road map, along with an automation road map and an new TLA from ARC highlighted today's information from the GE Fanuc Intelligent Platform user conference in sunny St. Louis.
Maryrose Sylvester, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platform CEO, announced in her keynote address this morning Proficy Platform and Proficy Workflow. Due to be released in the first quarter of 2008, these products will be built on Microsoft technologies--especially Workflow Foundation--and will take manufacturing software to a whole new level. Sylvester called it the "Googleization" of manufacturing software--meaning complete manufacturing software search capabilities (not the advertising model, I'm sure). I just left a meeting with Mike Yost and Sandhya Malur of GE Fanuc and Steve Chin of Microsoft where they discussed the pending partnership of the two companies in this product. Over and over the discussion returned to the concept of enabling people in manufacturing to be able to take appropriate actions in order to make their companies more competitive and profitable. I'll be drilling into specifics later.
This new software advance fits into ARC Advisory Group's latest three letter acronym--CPS. This stands for Collaborative Production Systems, the name of a new model just developed by Tom Fiske, Larry O'Brien and Craig Resnick of ARC. Resnick described the model to a packed room. The model essentially replaces what is known as MES, or manufacturing execution systems. The intent of the thinking is to reflect both the wishes of ARC's end user clients and the product development of its supplier clients to flatten and simplify the production information to operations management information flow. One of the conceptual problems of MES is that it consists of a large number of (sometimes) independent applications -- scheduling, inventory, OEE, quality and the like. ARC is telling suppliers to make the information flow simpler and more understandable so that end users can get actionable information in a more straightforward manner.
The automation road map includes a new integrated motion product line, also coming out next year, that will flesh out the PAC line.
And Dave, close your eyes here, there's a lot of talk about the process initiative and, ahem, hybrid controllers.
5:55:52 PM 
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