Asia launch for Proficy Process Systems

To mark the launch of its new offering for the process industry sector, in August, GE Fanuc Automation held a series of seminars throughout the Asia Pacific region. A three-city tour of Australia was followed by events held in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. Later this September, India will be the focus with seminars slated for Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Chennai.

According to GE Fanuc, Proficy Process Systems (PPS) aims to fill the gap between traditional DCS and PLC based systems, overcoming the limitations inherent in both approaches to deliver a solution for process industry customers that provides comprehensive regulatory control while being open, flexible, and available at a competitive price point.

At the Singapore launch, Steve Ryan, Director of Marketing, Global Process Solutions, highlighted some of the key market trends and industry pressures faced by both the hybrid and continuous process industries. These include the demands of emerging markets, changes in global demographics, ageing control systems, and the strive for alternative energy sources. “It’s a perfect storm,” said Ryan. “Many challenges but also many opportunities”.

Systems experience

Although some of the components of Proficy Process Systems may be familiar as existing GE Fanuc products, such as PAC controllers and Proficy Historian, it has been designed with a true systems approach and will deliver a true systems experience to customers, explained Ryan.

A key feature in PPS is a global namespace, which enables tags in the system to be defined once and then referenced and used commonly throughout the system. For example, there is no need to configure tags in the controller and then also in HMI screens.

This global namespace capability, says GE Fanuc, can reduce system configuration by 30 percent.

Through partnerships with Softing and Pepperl+Fuchs, PPS can use both FOUNDATION Fieldbus and PROFIBUS networks. And GE Fanuc’s embedded acquisitions of recent years have borne fruit in the form of the reflective memory capability that PPS uses for redundancy, said Ryan.