PROCOS Highlights

PROCOS Highlights With turbulent changes and future shocks looming everywhere in the business environment combined with an increased need to bring products to the market more quickly, and at a very low manufacturing cost, the European process industry has realised the necessity to focus on competitive key subjects like flexibility, costefficiency, accessibility and vendor independence. There is a growing awareness of the urgent need to define a factory automation strategy, which can be integrated as a key element in the overall information technology strategy. Viewed in this context, the new PROCOS on the Windows platform has been focused on a number of key success factors:

Open-endedness = Integrated production environment PROCOS is based on an open-ended platform with a build in integration to administrative systems ERP/MES/MIS. Further, PROCOS contains facilities to perform integrated communication to all important shop floor control systems, supporting a real multi-vendor environment.

Modularity = Flexible implementation The general distributed architecture of PROCOS makes it possible to implement small installations at a very low cost, and gradually upgrade these to medium and even large installations securing full usage of prior investments.

Standard Based = Low life cycle cost The system is, where possible, based on available defacto and ISO standards on hardware and software. This gives a maximum security for protection of investment, as the customer is independent of a specific hardware and software vendor. As an integrated facility PROCOS enables communication to a wide variety of 3rd party products like spreadsheets and relational databases. Basing PROCOS on available standards also secures full exploitation of the general market development towards faster and smaller units.

Proven Technology = Stability and Availability The basic platform for PROCOS is operational in numerous installations in leading industries and has as such proven a very high degree of stability. Further, the distributed architecture secures multiple access to the production areas and thereby increasing the general availability.

User friendliness = High efficiency The user interface of PROCOS is based on state-of-the-art technology increasing the operator efficiency. An object-oriented approach with a consistent look and feel focuses on the human aspects during the operation of the system.

Focused on specific market segments = Optimised characteristics PROCOS has been developed and fine-tuned for a limited market segment making it possible to focus on the specific problems that these market segments are facing. Initially, the following specific segments have created the background for defining the functionality of PROCOS :

Chemical and pharmaceutical industry

Food and beverage industry The PROCOS concept provides a total hardware and software solution for the overall production control as well as for the shop-floor control. Due to the modularity, and the fact that the product is based on available com-munication standards it is, however, possible to integrate with a wide variety of other vendors covering the shop-floor control.