One of the main challenges plant managers face is troubleshooting problems at a real-time level. From a plant and operational perspective, decision support applications focus on resource allocation and status.
Tools give users the ability to gather graphics, trending, lot data, and time-based data.
Last year, industrial automation software vendor Intellution, Foxboro, Mass., released VisiconX, an enterprisewide analytical tool to obtain and group data from relational databases. It provides a standard for enterprisewide integration to enable information sharing within an organization, its supply chain, its collaborative engineering community, and customers. DNA-M is a framework for applications development. The product is unique in that users do not have to know or do any programming or scripting that is typically required with anyone else s ActiveX controls, says Bob Thaler, a Intellution product marketing director. Through iCore, users can bind different ActiveX controls together and do the work they want to do, which is to analyze data.