ICONICS, Inc.

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Strategies for Operational Excellence
Companies across the world face a variety of business problems including the integration of disparate systems and vendors' proprietary system formats, physical/data security concerns, global competition, IT bottlenecks, and constantly changing corporate priorities. Operational Excellence helps to alleviate these concerns and meet business-driven goals such as continuous improvement, unified visualization of data, real-time performance, flexibility/adaptability and plant floor connectivity. Implementing an Operational Excellence strategy helps lead to better collaboration from plant floor to the executive level and provides empowerment throughout the organization.

This whitepaper contains information on ICONICS' GENESIS32 Automation Suite and BizViz Manufacturing Intelligence Software Suite and their application towards achieving Operational Excellence.

Intended Audience: Plant Managers, Operators, Manufacturing Executives, Process Engineers, IT Professionals, Maintenance Personnel, anyone looking to apply Operational Excellence within their company and using GENESIS32 and BizViz in real-time manufacturing environments.

Manufacturing Intelligence Solutions
Manufacturing Intelligence provides a common basis for using manufacturing information from the plant floor to enterprise systems and business partners. Supporting the enterprise's information and visualization requirements goes beyond HMI software and places new demands on manufacturing management systems.

This whitepaper, authored by Craig Resnick of ARC Advisory Group, contains information on several ICONICS' and third-party solutions. An overview of ICONICS BizViz and other manufacturing intelligence suites is presented.

Intended Audience: Plant Managers, Operators, Manufacturing Executives, Process Engineers, IT Professionals, Maintenance Personnel

KPI, OEE and Downtime Analytics
Plant engineers and managers need to make informed decisions and implement best practices and may need to have some of the following questions answered:

Which machines need to be serviced, replaced, or decommissioned?
Have my production goals been achieved? Am I on target to achieve them?
Were the machine and station cycle times within design specifications?
Are certain production cells or stations bypassed during production?
What is the total performance and total availability?

Plant and operations personnel can make informed decisions using advanced downtime reporting capabilities. This white paper explains the ICONICS Downtime Analytics solution and the modules that comprise it.

Intended Audience: Plant Managers, Operators, Manufacturing Executives, Process Engineers, IT Professionals, Maintenance Personnel

DataWorX32 - OPC Tunneling
OPC Communications has become the de facto standard for data exchange between industrial automation applications. ICONICS solutions allow OPC communications to be "tunneled" within other communications layers or technologies. This has proven to be a very effective approach that both eliminates the need for DCOM, and provides for a more open communications system, and one that evolves and improves along with OPC standards.

This whitepaper contains information on ICONICS solutions utilizing OPC Tunneling, such as DataWorX32, as well as an overview of the OPC Tunneling concept in general.

Intended Audience: Engineers working on implementing OPC Communications over WANs, anyone desiring a better understanding of OPC Tunneling.

DataWorX32 - Software Redundancy
DataWorX32 Professional provides support for redundant IO Servers (OPC DA), redundant Alarm Servers (AlarmWorX32 AE), redundant loggers, and redundant Historical Replay Servers. Configuring redundancy is easy, requiring only the entry of the node name (or address) of the backup node. GENESIS32's built-in MonitorWorX function continuously monitors the health of the primary and secondary servers of each redundant server pair. Built-in process point tags provide status of the redundant pairs and provide the ability to control failovers via logic.

This whitepaper contains information on DataWorX32 redundancy and how it can be applied to various redundancy schemes.

Intended Audience:Engineers working on implementing fault tolerant solutions through redundancy, anyone desiring a better understanding of OPC redundancy.

SNMP Overview
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) allows devices to expose useful information to other devices. Types of information can range from the CPU fan speed of a computer to the routing table of the router. Almost every network device answers to SNMP requests. SNMP gives Network Managers access to information from nearly every device connected to a network.

This whitepaper contains information meant to familiarize users with SNMP technology and user training. In addition to basic SNMP Protocol, it also provides assistance with creating a GraphWorX32 display that shows useful SNMP information carried on the network.

Intended Audience: System Integrators, IT professionals, plant engineers, or anyone desiring to have a better understanding and expand their knowledge of SNMP connectivity.

FDA 21 CFR Part 11 Overview
FDA 21 CFR Part 11 covers the proper handling of recording FDA-regulated information electronically and applying "electronic signatures," such that they are considered by the FDA to be "equivalent" to that of handwritten signatures and documents. GENESIS32 contains several components that may be useful to companies wishing to comply with this regulation.

This whitepaper covers various sections within FDA 21 CFR Part 11 as well as relevant features within the GENESIS32 suite.

Intended Audience: Engineers working on implementing FDA 21 CFR 11 solutions, anyone desiring a better understanding of this regulation, End-users seeking information on industrial automation software solutions within FDA-regulated environments.

SAP BAPI Connector
Plant engineers and managers need to make informed decisions and implement best practices. Many are looking for answers to questions such as “Which machines need to be serviced, replaced, or decommissioned?”, “Have my production goals been achieved and am I on target to achieve them?” or “What is the total performance and total availability?” Plant and operations personnel are able to make informed decisions using advanced downtime reporting capabilities.

This whitepaper uses Knowledge Point Indicators (KPIs), Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and Downtime to demonstrate the collection, analysis, and reporting of system data. ICONICS GENESIS32 and BizViz suites enable plants to significantly improve efficiencies by capturing detailed events, faults, and production information from equipment and operators for a variety of analytics with the ICONICS reporting, data management and visualization toolsets.

Intended Audience: Plant Managers, Operators, Manufacturing Executives, Process Engineers, IT Professionals, Maintenance Personnel, anyone desiring a better understanding of KPI, OEE or Downtime factors and analysis.

Fault Tolerance Redundancy
Reliability and uptime have become critically important because of the mission-critical functionality now concentrated in HMI/SCADA server applications. Improving the reliability and fault tolerance of applications that strictly monitor and view data can be done by simply adding a second or redundant PC workstation. Improving the reliability and fault tolerance for server applications requires strong initial planning.

This whitepaper contains information on several ICONICS and third-party products that may be useful for companies wishing to apply fault tolerance and redundancy to their GENESIS32 or BizViz system.

Intended Audience: Engineers working on implementing fault tolerant solutions through redundancy, anyone desiring a better understanding of software features that support redundancy, End-users requiring information on using GENESIS32 and BizViz in redundant configurations.

MonitorWorX Quick Start
MonitorWorX is a new tool introduced in GENESIS32 V9. Its main purpose is to collect the runtime information from other modules and expose it, either via a GUI or as process points.

Intended Audience: Plant Managers, Operators, Manufacturing Executives, Process Engineers, SAP Specialists, IT Professionals, Maintenance Personnel, anyone desiring a better understanding of utilizing SAP in a real-time manufacturing environment.

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