Mincom, a leading global provider of software and services for asset-intensive industries, today introduced Mincom Ellipse 8, the industry’s most modern and complete Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution set designed expressly for industries with asset-intensive operating environments. The result of a multi-million dollar R&D effort, representing more than 1,000 man-years of development, Mincom Ellipse 8 provides asset-heavy industries - such as mining, defense, energy, public infrastructure and transit - with a fully integrated and mobile-enabled suite of business-critical applications that improves their return on assets and workforce productivity, while also addressing the challenges inherent in remote and geographically dispersed operations that distinguish asset-heavy industries from corporate-office environments.
“Mincom Ellipse 8 is the culmination of extensive and detailed input from our customers, as well as three decades of deep industry and domain expertise,” said Greg Clark, CEO of Mincom. “Mincom Ellipse 8 represents a major step forward for EAM technology and best practices, mobile work management, and industry-specific solutions that address the challenges unique to our customers’ businesses. Our open-standards approach means Mincom now offers customers more breadth in terms of choice, enabled by the new Mincom Integration Platform and Mincom Enterprise Reporting & Analytics. Mincom now delivers the power of its best-in-class EAM and mobile workforce management solutions to asset-intensive businesses that have adopted ERP solutions from Oracle or SAP.”
Added Clark, “Equally significant, Mincom Ellipse 8 incorporates best practices from PAS 55, the emerging best-practices framework for asset management, and supports businesses around the world as they embrace this approach.”
Asset-intensive enterprises are vastly different from corporate-office environments, often maintaining 24x7 operations in dangerous or remote geographic locations, with inherently more complexity and higher risk. In addition, the majority of their workforces tend to be mobile and geographically disbursed. Because Mincom Ellipse 8 includes mobile workforce management applications for inspections, asset surveying, field-process automation and mobile work planning, customers can use Mincom Ellipse 8 to ensure workers with the right skills will be at the right location, with the right information needed to complete a job.
“No other EAM solution provides a fully integrated mobile workforce management solution based on an enterprise-scalable mobile platform, with both planned and real-time capabilities for scheduling and dispatching workers,” said Clark.
Mincom Ellipse 8: The New Standard for Asset-Intensive EAM
Representing the new enterprise standard for asset-intensive organizations worldwide, Mincom Ellipse 8 is comprised of three fundamental components: Mincom Ellipse 8 applications for asset-intensive EAM and ERP; the new Mincom Integration Platform, an enterprise integration platform that delivers out-of-the-box integration to leading ERP solutions and an enterprise-scalable mobile application platform; and Mincom Enterprise Reporting & Analytics, an open and integrated solution delivering advanced analytics and intelligent reporting.
These new components together deliver the following advancements to Mincom customers:
Next-Generation Architecture. Mincom Ellipse 8 delivers a modern, Web-native underlying infrastructure, with a lightweight technology footprint built on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to significantly lower IT costs and resource requirements. Built on a Java runtime, open standards, and the option of a Linux/Intel stack, Mincom Ellipse 8 is also “cloud enabled,” network friendly, and has been performance and regression tested for large user bases, with pre-built data and integration tools.
Personalization & Ease of Use. Mincom Ellipse 8 has been designed with usability as a core tenet, offering users personalization capabilities without the cost of customization, a consistent look and feel, and an intuitive user interface that reduces training costs and facilitates adoption. Through personalization, customers can tailor and configure the end-user experience to suit the specific requirements of their individual roles without needing to modify the code base.
Best-Practice Asset Management. Mincom Ellipse 8 was built around PAS 55, which is fast emerging as the global best-practices approach for asset management. The Publically Available Specification (PAS): 55-1:2008 framework is gaining adoption worldwide as “good practice” guidance for optimizing asset management systems and processes, and reducing risk to workers, the environment and the business. Mincom Ellipse 8 supports and enables organizations seeking to implement PAS 55 processes across their business to standardize EAM practices, maximize asset performance, and improve reliability and customer service, while also complying with key regulatory frameworks.
Mincom Ellipse 8 also introduces two new paradigms for asset management:
• Risk and criticality: The ability to plan, monitor and change asset strategies, and manage assets in terms of both risk and criticality by providing a framework for the structured prioritization of work and maintenance, improving asset availability and ultimately service delivery to customers.
• Geospatial perspective: Enables location-based asset management with out-of-the-box integration to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) such as ESRI, GE Smallworld, Intergraph, and MapInfo.
Advanced Work Planning. Mincom Ellipse 8 now delivers true workforce optimization, including management of third-party contractors. The new work-planning capabilities in Mincom Ellipse 8 employ GIS, and both long- and short-term planning and scheduling of work and asset maintenance, to deliver a closed-loop process for work management.
Mobile Workforce Management. Now with an embedded mobile platform - and applications such as Mincom Field Data Platform for process and forms automation; Mincom Mobile Inspector for real-time asset inspection; Mincom Mobile Worker for in-field work management; Mincom Mobile Navigator for turn-by-turn street-level directions; Mincom Mobile Locator for viewing assets in a spatial environment; and Mincom Commander for optimized real-time scheduling - Mincom Ellipse 8 users can manage assets from the point of inspection, automate field-based processes, and optimize the mobile workforce, including third-party contractors.
Materials & Inventory Management. Mincom Ellipse 8 offers asset-intensive businesses total asset visibility, including the location and status of an asset, as well as visibility of critical parts associated with that asset, and the optimization of parts inventory to the asset strategy. In addition, Mincom Ellipse 8 ensures financial fidelity of an asset, enabling businesses to understand the true cost and capital investment of an asset at any point in its lifecycle.
Enterprise Reporting & Analytics. Mincom Ellipse 8 offers customers more choice and flexibility with its new enterprise reporting and analytics solution, providing open access to rich data within their Ellipse EAM and ERP environments - enabling enterprise visibility, improved decision support and performance management across the enterprise.
Commented Ralph Rio, research director of enterprise software, ARC Advisory Group, “Mincom’s new release of Ellipse represents a substantial step forward in four key areas: technology, functionality, ease of use, and open architecture. The software is deployed in pure Java on Linux and can be run in a cloud model. And with configuration down to the fields displayed in a particular screen, the software can be customized to match a customer’s workflow and business processes. The open standards enable collaboration with other applications and people across an enterprise - a key theme in ARC’s strategic advice to its clients. With those four bases covered, the Mincom Ellipse 8 release is a home run.”
Delivery and Implementation
Mincom offers implementation services to reduce the risk and cost for customers upgrading to Mincom Ellipse 8, and employs a business-transformation methodology to enable customers to realize the full potential from their Mincom Ellipse 8 implementations. Mincom Ellipse 8 can be delivered as a managed service, both on-premise or hosted within Mincom’s worldwide data centers.
Availability
Mincom Ellipse 8 is generally available for companies using SAP, Oracle, Mincom or other leading ERP solutions today. For more information, see http://www.mincom.com/en/solutions/Ellipse8.aspx.
About Mincom
Mincom Pty Ltd is a global software and services provider with nearly 30 years of experience in providing business solutions to companies in asset-intensive industries, such as mining, defense, energy and public infrastructure, in more than 40 countries around the world. Mincom customers include Anglo American, Thales, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Boeing, National Grid, London Underground, Xstrata Copper, Western Power, QBuild, BNSF Railway, EDF Energy, Caterpillar, Siberian Services and Ecopetrol. Mincom Inc. operates in North America and is a subsidiary of Mincom Pty Ltd. Mincom is owned by Francisco Partners. For more information about Mincom, visit: www.mincom.com.
