You Say You Want a (Revo)Solution

Greeting from San Antonio and the 2010 Emerson Exchange. After two very busy days, I thought I’d share one of the best ideas I’ve seen from Emerson. Spread around the technology exhibits are “Solution” areas. These areas showcase the coming together of Emerson technologies to solve real world problems.

Why is this important? People like stories. People like things put into context. People want to see how it all comes together. The Life Sciences Solutions area demonstrates connectivity between Syncade and SynTQ from Optimal. It integrates electronic workflow with orchestrations for material identification.

I also shot a quick video of the filling line solution area and have posted it up on my YouTube site.

Securing IE for Alarm Response Procedures

I got a very thoughtful call the other day from David Stokes at Eli Lilly. Dave had found my Alarm Response Procedure video out on my YouTube channel. Eli Lilly is a big user of the DCA (Document Control and Archiving) module of Syncade and they had talked about going down the same sort of path, utilizing the kiosk mode of DCA for direct call up of effective documents right from DeltaV.

The potential roadblock they hit was a security risk. If you look at the IE window that the PDF appears in, you’ll notice the menu bar is present.

The risk is if someone were to click on the File menu, then click on Save As… - they could start dropping html files all over the DeltaV system. Just as critical is having the toolbar buttons or the address bar along the top.

Turns out there is a lot of chatter on the Internet on how to secure IE. I found registry hacks and even tweak programs. The easiest (and safest, IMHO) way to get rid of the menu bar is by making a Group Policy change.

Click on Start, then Run… and type gpedit.msc – drill in to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Internet Explorer. Then look for a Setting named “Turn on menu bar by default”. Double click on it and change it to Disabled. That gets rid of the menu bar.

You can get rid of toolbars by drilling down into the Toolbars and enabling some policies:

The address bar is trickier, it’s a registry change. Go figure. You need to go into:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbars\Restrictions\

You’ll have to add a DWORD – NoNavBar with a value of 0x00000001.

This technique would be used to secure your operator stations and all assumes you’re logged into Windows as the administrator. There could be other scenarios depending on your exact setup. When all is said and done, your final IE window will look something like this:

Alarm Response Procedures - Alarm Help on Steroids

I’ve written lately about the new Alarm Help feature in DeltaV V11. But what if you need more? What if you need to control, from a regulatory point of view, that only the current, effective version of an SOP is used to respond to an alarm condition? What if you need to include drawings or pictures as part of your alarm help information?

Follow the link at the bottom of this post to check out my Alarm Response Procedure integration video. It shows how an alarm generated within DeltaV causes an ARP button to appear on a module faceplate. Clicking on the button launches an IE window to the DCA application of Syncade where the specific SOP is called up in Kiosk mode.

The video can be found on my YouTube site at www.youtube.com/acmebiotech

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

SharePoint As An Automation Dashboard

We’ve been doing some heavy experimenting lately, exploiting SharePoint (specifically WSS 3.0) as a dashboard tool for DeltaV. And while we’re messing around with some 3rd party tools specifically developed for accessing real-time data, I also wanted to see what we could do using the out-of-the-box web parts.

SharePoint is SQL based, so it’s SQL aware, almost SQL friendly. And since DeltaV has lots of stuff stored away in SQL (batch data, Syncade data, alarms and events data), this seemed like a good place to start.

First thing though, you’ve got to have Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. The good news, it’s now free from Microsoft (Bill Gates must have been feeling especially generous one day). Click here to follow the link to the download site. You’ll want to get a good book on Designer and SharePoint (I’m still looking for one).

The specific tool we’ve been experimenting with is the data view web part. So to get a summary of orders from Syncade, you create a data source into the DMI_EBR database, looking at the vOrders view:

Note how sorting and filtering are possible right within creating the data source. You can then check to make sure you’ve set everything up right by looking at the data:

Then it’s just a matter of dropping the data source on a SharePoint web page. You can even link one data view web part to another. For example, selecting a particular Syncade order in the upper web part populates the lower web part of all the work instructions executed during the order:

Is it really just that easy? No way – you’ll need to spend a lot of time with this, but the benefits are huge. Next post I’ll talk about other techniques for unlocking the hidden value of your data.

Shareware Behavior

The powerful little workhorses inside of the work instructions of Syncade are called “Behaviors”. I wondered where this terminology came from so I turned to the one true source of all knowledge on the Internet – Wikipedia. Once you wade through the animal and psychology sections, you get this definition:

“Behavior as used in computer science is an anthropomorphic construct that assigns ‘life’ to the activities carried out by a computer, computer application, or computer code in response to stimuli, such as user input. Also, ‘a behavior’ is a reusable block of computer code or script that, when applied to an object (computer science), especially a graphical one, causes it to respond to user input in meaningful patterns or to operate independently”

Out of the RA (Recipe Authoring) box you get some behaviors as part of Syncade. You also get a nifty Behavior Editor program for developing your own. As part of our in-house development work with Syncade, Scott Thompson came up with a clever new behavior to generate an email REM_SIMPLE_EMAIL.

You could conditionally notify a supervisor his attention is need – based on events. You could generate the status of an order, from inside the order, to folks who aren’t normally monitoring the batch. You could automatically notify your local business partner to dispatch a site services engineer because of an equipment or instrumentation failure.

I think there’re so many uses, I’ve posted the behavior up on the acmebiotech.com web site and made it available as a shareware, as-is download. Follow this link to the page for both the behavior and detailed instructions.

If you like it (or hate it), tell Scott and I about it.

UGOC 2009 Day 2

What a turn out yesterday! We had over 100 customers pack our campus. The most popular presentations were our wireless talks and Syncade – it was standing room only when Scott Thompson and I presented our Syncade in Depth talk.

One of the big hits during the product showcase was Dick Beverly from Emerson ASCO Numatics showing off their line of smart valve manifolds/remote IO. And I do mean smart. Not only do they handle analog and discrete signals in addition to the manifold outputs, talk all the major busses including Foundation Fieldbus and Ethernet, but their DeviceNet version supports a DeviceLogix module, allowing high speed (5 ms) function block or ladder logic.

I’m excited about now being able to offer a one stop shopping controls and automation solution. For example, handling high speed valve sequencing around the bowl of a centrifuge in addition to all the other required skid batch automation is now possible as part of a total Emerson solution.

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.