Sync With Syncade 2.0

We’re putting the finishing touches on version 2.0 of our Sync With Syncade utility. We developed Sync about a year ago to allow DeltaV and other automation platforms with OPC servers to trigger Events on Equipment in Emerson’s Syncade ET module.

Of course one of the first things I heard when I presented Sync With Syncade at the 2009 Emerson Exchange was “can you reverse the process and have Syncade trigger DeltaV?” Well, now we can. In version 2.0, you can configure Sync to monitor Event states and write values into parameters via OPC when an Event changes state.

 

This could come in handy for a deployment of Syncade and ET without workflow. By using Sync, a tripped event on a piece of equipment in ET can cause a parameter in a DeltaV module to be set, thereby causing an SFC to start running.

Checkout a short demo video on my YouTube site – www.youtube.com/acmebiotech

Sync With Syncade

So what’s the first thing we did after getting our full-blown install of Syncade? We developed a utility.

Syncade (Emerson Process Management’s Smart Operations/MES suite) is a great collection of modules for Material Management, Order Management, Equipment Tracking, Training and Development, Document Control and Archiving, etc.

And while it’s tightly integrated with DeltaV’s batch engine, it needed a little help when it comes to tying non-batch processes and events to its suite of modules.

So that’s where Sync With Syncade comes in – it bridges the real-time world with the transactional one. OPC flags are used to trigger events associated with equipment in the ET module. These events can then cause workflow to automatically begin.

The cool thing about Sync With Syncade is that it installs on an OPC server – anyone’s OPC server. The communication to Syncade is handled by a web service call.

This was our first implementation using web services – definitely more to come.

You can check out the product data sheet for Sync With Syncade here.