GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, on April 23 announced that Linde AG of Munich, Germany, has chosen Proficy Historian and Proficy Plant Applications, part of GE Fanuc’s Operations Management software suite, for use in its plants worldwide. The order, which also encompasses GE Fanuc’s GlobalCare support services is worth more than $1 million and will be deployed in 350 sites worldwide.
The Linde Group is a world-leading gases and engineering company with almost 52,000 employees in approximately 100 countries. The company’s strategy is geared toward earnings-based growth and focused on the expansion of its international business, based on forward-looking gases applications and plant construction solutions.
Linde expanded through several acquisitions in the last few years, which brought along legacy commitments to manufacturing systems from other vendors. While Linde had experience with GE Fanuc’s Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX product, each part of their business was satisfied with the solutions they had installed and were resistant to significant change. The company’s management realized the need to standardize on a global historian infrastructure as the data foundation upon which to standardize operating practices, production reporting, and information flow across their enterprise. Based on their experience with iFIX they invited GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms to participate in the bidding for the new system.
“At the end of it all, Linde selected Proficy software because we had a superior solution at a fair price and were willing to work closely with them,” said Erik Udstuen, vice president of software for GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms. “Linde required a very large system (400,000 tags) and had high expectations for performance and scalability. Pilot evaluations proved that our Proficy Historian performed very well and compared very favorably to the competition.”
“The GE Fanuc Tools will ensure that our people have access to the critical plant performance data needed to operate our plants reliably and efficiently across the world,” said Ralf Speth, head of operations, Linde AG. “The features and functions of the products will reduce costs for Linde in the future. And, as one of the largest companies in the world, it is a solid partner for us moving forward.”
The Proficy solution is the basis of a Plant Line Information Management System, consisting of a centralized historical database installation. Proficy Historian provides a robust and effective plant data repository to collect, archive and distribute large volumes of real-time, plant floor information quickly and easily. Several ROC (Remote Operation Center) systems access data via Proficy HMI/SCADA – iFIX on a terminal server basis to evaluate production data and to control processes. The team chose iFIX as the Historian client providing easy integration.
The Linde Plant Information Management system is completed with GE Fanuc’s Proficy Plant Applications to process raw data, calculate and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) to act on current business data. These KPIs will deliver insights into the company’s production performance information to optimize the efficiency of the gas production and increase the quality of the processes.
In addition, GE Fanuc will install Proficy Real-Time Information Portal to enable Linde management to retrieve production data and determine cost influences caused by certain production events. Novotek, a solution partner of GE Fanuc’s in Europe, supports the entire solution with its Trendview and Alarm Analysis tool for data evaluation.
“This system will be key to Linde’s efforts for increasing production and decreasing energy costs,” added Udstuen. “The established equipment modeling and out-of-the-box reporting and analysis capabilities offered by Plant Applications would have required custom development with other industry solutions.”
“The uniqueness of the GE tools is that they span from trending to alarm & event analysis to on-line KPI tracking to management reporting which gives great visibility of plant information in one environment,” said Lars Wallstén, head of performance systems, Linde AG.