Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, has announced that a new version of Ampla, its innovative software that delivers a dynamic view of process performance, has been made available for the southern African market.
This latest issue of the software presents enhancements aimed to overcome the traditionally demanding process of reconciling inventory data.
Plant Operation Ampla is Schneider Electric’s leading operations management software. It connects to multiple plant and business systems to harvest relevant data, which is then presented as easy-to-understand, near real-time intelligence for productivity analysis. This enables operators to resolve performance issues, such as process bottlenecks and downtime events, quickly as well as accurately calculate KPIs and real production costs.
New to StruxureWare Plant Operation Ampla 6.0 is its inventory module, which has been updated to precisely and effectively perform reconciliation of inventory data that, in a plant, is often disordered and erroneous. Disorder or variation in inventory data is normal, but result in poor data.
This can be caused by common events such as drift in instrumentation or late arriving data due to a reliance on non real-time inventory sources, such as batch-based systems or truck/ fleet management systems. The difficulties associated with the management of inventory data can be costly, often involving time consuming manual work, as missing or incorrect data can sometimes take days to find manually.
“Ampla 6.0 offers a significant reduction in inventory data handling time and peace of mind ensuring that our customers can truly trust their data. Importantly, rather than time spent on gathering and fixing inventory, the next evolution of Ampla will allow our customers to spend their valuable time managing their business,” says Quintin McCutcheon, marketing and operations manager for Industry Business at Schneider Electric South Africa.
The key benefits of Plant Operation Ampla 6.0 include:
* Flexibility to handle any errors or modifications in inventory data;
* ncreased data accuracy;
* Reduced manual time to reconcile data; and
* Reduced cost to manage inaccurate data.
Prior to being introduced to the southern African region, these new enhancements were developed in conjunction with a leading, large-scale mining customer in Australia, and thoroughly tested in the company’s production environments.
According to McCutcheon, when this customer ran the enhanced Ampla Inventory system in parallel with its traditional spreadsheet system for a period of one month, they discovered significant and costly errors (up to AU$500,000) in their old spreadsheet system.
“This is a tried and proven enhancement to Ampla, which shows just how many errors can be found in inventory systems based on traditional spreadsheet systems,” he adds.
Ampla is embedded in StruxureWare for maximized business performance and as such, has been renamed to StruxureWare Plant Operation Ampla. The StruxureWare software applications and suites make up a comprehensive platform that gives industrial customers the ability to see, measure and manage efficient enterprise from shop floor to top floor, across three levels of their business: enterprise, operations and control. By addressing the primary challenge of each, it delivers the right information to the right person, anywhere and at anytime.
