Is the Process Graphic Dead, or Just Dying?
The newest generation of manufacturing engineers and operators have, for the most part, grown up with ubiquitous access to computers and the internet. They are more tech-savvy than the previous generation, and the applications that they use on a daily basis have trained them to just expect things to work. These applications have also trained them to consume information in a new way…think Web 2.0. As the MES space has formed over the last decade, the methods by which MES is delivered have been very fragmented.
Reasons that MES functionality wasn’t deployed in the existing HMI applications:
- MES applications were built using newer technologies, and the older HMI platforms were not capable of running them
- HMI application was deemed to be critical to the operation, which led to fear of causing downtime due to stability concerns regarding the newer, unproven MES
- There were different audiences for each system, and operators were not expected to interact directly with the MES
- Last, but not least, integration was too costly
As more and more plant floor applications are built with MES in mind from the very beginning, and as operators are expected to take a bigger role in managing the data associated with manufacturing, will the process graphic be relegated to the “troubleshoot” link for use only when things are not going as planned?
