UNIFIED PRODUCTION MODEL

FactoryTalk® VantagePoint is a business intelligence solution that helps companies make the most of their existing manufacturing data by enabling all personnel to view and share information, in the proper context, to help them do their jobs better.

The key to its power is the Unified Production Model (UPM), which integrates data from all of a company’s many different manufacturing and enterprise data sources. This includes Rockwell Automation Integrated Architecture™ components as well as virtually any other systems, including:

• Other suppliers’ control systems and devices, such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), distributed control systems (DCS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)  systems;
• Manufacturing applications such as human-machine interface (HMI) systems,  process historians, planning systems, maintenance management systems, manufacturing execution systems (MES) and laboratory information management systems (LIMS); and
• Business systems such as ERP systems, supply chain management (SCM) systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and content management systems.

The UPM consolidates access to the data and presents it to users via a single consistent interface that is independent of all of those data sources. It makes the information more understandable because it organizes the data to logically represent the manufacturing business. You don’t need to know where the data actually resides in order to use FactoryTalk VantagePoint, nor do you need to navigate different user interfaces or understand the many protocols needed to access the different data sources.

Unique Model Advantages

• The UPM federates data so that it remains at the original source and there’s a single version of the truth. It gathers data only when requested by a user, so all data is fresh. It also stores calculated and aggregated data for high performance.
• It unifies data so there’s one coherent model across different sources so people can get the “big picture” and yet meet all compliance and security requirements.
• It provides a realistic view of manufacturing so you deal with equipment and products not IT concepts or technical jargon like tag names. And it lets people build, use and share knowledge through all forms of reports, graphics, KPIs and dashboards.
• It’s flexible so you can create your own model or deploy an industry standard like ISA-95, which means you get started faster, right out of the box. It can be customized for continuous or batch processes as well as discrete manufacturing.
• It’s .NET programmable so you can built composite manufacturing applications and it uses a 100% services oriented architecture so enterprise integration is easy. It also uses SQL Server Stored Procedures so you can use RDBMS and BI reporting tools.
• It provides extensive reusability because you can report against the logical model rather than the physical data sources. It uses defined manufacturing types so it encourages standardization and re-use of content. It also separates data sources from data consumers so the impact of change is reduced and growth is easily accommodated.

Extensive User Libraries

FactoryTalk VantagePoint includes libraries of predefined types, called packages.  You can choose to inherit from and extend these existing types or you can build new types from scratch to model your most complex manufacturing processes. Once you’ve defined a type, items or instances of this type can be created in the Incuity namespace. The UPM libraries can be built on industry standards such as ISA-95 or they can be hybrids of standards or custom libraries you create yourself. The libraries cover all the bases because they include types for equipment, materials, personnel, locations, process segments, production capabilities, product definitions, production schedules and production performance—literally everything you’d need to describe and model your operations.