The software enhances the company’s Proficy software suite - a platform for driving reliable, profitable operations in a plant and across the enterprise - by ensuring that maintenance operations are integrated.
The product can scale up from a simple condition-monitoring system to a sophisticated orchestration to help maximise asset utilisation and reliability.
Sheila Kester, business general manager for GE Fanuc Operations Management Software, said: ‘By keeping the production and maintenance departments ‘in-synch’, an organisation eliminates the costly delays in responding to the plant’s evolving operational dynamics.
‘Furthermore, the continuity and accuracy in the information flow between production and maintenance teams allows the organisation to take proactive steps to eliminate hidden costs before they are incurred.’ The new release extends the proven capabilities of Proficy Maintenance Gateway by providing a new automatic measurement point update module, enhanced write-back functions from the enterprise to the plant systems, and new adaptors to enterprise asset maintenance (EAM) applications, such as SAP’s PM module and newer versions of Maximo.
The broad range of connectivity options, ease-of-use by plant personnel and ability to incrementally scale from small to large installations make the solution desirable to companies in many asset-intensive industries - from utilities to facilities-management companies to the full spectrum of process industries and discrete manufacturers.
Coleman Easterly, product general manager for GE Fanuc Operations Management Software, said: ‘Proficy Maintenance Gateway acts as an integration engine of the production and maintenance processes of an enterprise, continuously driving business-critical efficiencies in both departments in real-time.
‘This is achieved by leveraging and extracting more from the core capabilities of our Proficy Plant Applications family while doing the same with the EAM systems in an organisation.’ Proficy Maintenance Gateway tracks and helps reduce the mean-time-to-repair in ‘corrective maintenance’ cases while working continuously to monitor usage of equipment and automatically ordering ‘preventive maintenance’ orders for improved performance.
The product is designed for maintenance and/or production personnel - there is no code to write and no need for IT overhead.
Out-of-the-box EAM connectors accelerate deployments and reduce a customer’s time-to-value to days rather than weeks or months.
The enhanced rules engine offers more flexibility for time-based meters and status updates of work orders to the control system.
Proficy Maintenance Gateway lets companies: reduce equipment failure rates and unplanned downtime; improve first-pass quality and reduce waste; reduce turnaround time for repairs and planned maintenance costs; improve reliability and uncover additional capacity; track and manage reliability plans with rules and aggregators, including total uptimes or availability of individual equipment over a period of time; and implement reliability centred maintenance (RCM) strategies with increased analysis and refinement of RCM rules.
Easterly added: ‘Proficy Maintenance Gateway enables an organisation’s existing asset management system to drive the right set of maintenance strategies for their equipment in a timely manner.
‘It takes into consideration the current, real-time dynamics of the plant equipment and production, rather than being solely based on a set of pre-planned conditions and assumptions.
‘This real-time synchronisation between production and maintenance can dramatically reduce unplanned and hidden costs in the short term, while continuously driving improvement in plant reliability in the long run.’