To help manufacturers gain better control over their industrial machinery, software maker Wonderware used Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to embed new collaboration features into Wonderware industrial plant management software. The result is an enhanced product line that Wonderware customers can use to more easily communicate and address questions from factory floor operators.

Business Needs

Wonderware is a leading maker of industrial software used for manufacturing operations such as execution, product quality management, and supervisory control. The company’s InTouch software line, which was launched in the 1980s, is used today to provide real-time operations functions in about 125,000 manufacturing plants and facilities worldwide.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 provides powerful technologies for enhancing communications across different mediums, including factory floor terminals, PCs, and handheld devices.  Ivan Todorov Development Manager for Application Services Wonderware

Kathleen Regan, Director of Strategic Alliances for Wonderware, says that while enormous advances have occurred in industrial plant automation, a key challenge remains—integrating human decision making into industrial processes.
 
“If you look at the technology advancements of the past 20 years, our industry has done a great job creating solutions that make it possible for machines to talk to each other—but has not done much to help people talk to each other quickly and efficiently when there is a question or a problem related to a process,” Regan says. “We have technology that can identify literally in microseconds whether a machine needs maintenance, but it might take hours for someone to decide whether to address the problem immediately or to wait a week. Those kinds of decisions have to be made by people, and industrial software doesn’t easily support decision-making processes.”

Solution

Wonderware, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, tackled the issue by taking core technologies from Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and incorporating them into its manufacturing solutions. These technologies include instant messaging (IM), Web conferencing, and presence, which shows whether someone in a network is online and available to communicate.

Incorporation of the Microsoft technologies helps machine operators on factory floors and their colleagues throughout the enterprise to resolve problems faster than they could in the past. If a machine operator has a question or problem, the operator can open a small window embedded in the Wonderware industrial software and then view a list of contacts, their roles within the organization, and whether the contacts are online and available. The window is based on the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 client. The operator can then quickly identify the appropriate person to contact and can use IM to send a query. The employees who are contacted do not need to be using the Wonderware software—they only need access to Office Communicator 2007 R2 on a personal computer.

Users can conduct a quick IM session or open a full video conferencing session, and they can include multiple team members in either. Conference participants can open and share machinery schematics and other detailed technical information, with all participants viewing the same document in real time to speed up decision making. The solution also uses bots—small pieces of software that integrate with the Office Communicator window─to perform tasks such as sending alerts if a machine or process needs attention.

The Wonderware development team began integrating the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 technologies in January 2009, and had a working prototype two

Employees can conduct IM sessions and Web conferences within Wonderware applications.

months later. “Office Communications Server 2007 R2 provides a great framework for plugging new features into our existing solutions without having to do much customization,” says Ivan Todorov, Development Manager for Application Services at Wonderware.

Benefits

Using Office Communications Server 2007 R2 has helped Wonderware to dramatically enhance its manufacturing process software, in turn helping its customers improve productivity and response times while cutting costs. Plus the company has gained flexible and extensible technologies to use for further innovation.

• Easy, efficient communications. By embedding Office Communications Server 2007 R2 functions in its software, Wonderware offers its customers tools for communicating quickly and efficiently across the enterprise. “Office Communications Server 2007 R2 provides powerful technologies for enhancing communications across different mediums, including factory floor terminals, PCs, and handheld devices,” says Todorov. “It is also easy to use, which helps minimize training.”
• Flexible platform for modifying solutions. Being able to selectively implement particular Office Communications Server 2007 R2 components provides Wonderware with great flexibility in modifying its industrial software. “This capability gives us room to provide a lot of added value with additional features and benefits in our own software,” says Regan. “It makes modifications much faster and easier than if we had to design the functionality ourselves.”
• Extensible technologies for the future. Regan says Office Communications Server 2007 R2 offers an extensible set of tools and technologies, making possible continual innovation. “There were alternative technologies that we could have used,” she says. “But when we commit to a technology, we evaluate whether it will continue to be available and useful for us in the years ahead. With Microsoft and Office Communications Server 2007 R2, we know that we can rely on a powerful, stable platform for years to come.”

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Document published July 2009