Chris, I wanted to share some information with you. I am by no mean an integrator and I do not have any fancy EE degree or anything like that. What I do have is an associated in Electronics. But what I mainly want to do is tell you what I know about IA and their product.
The very first thing I would do if I was in your shoes would be to ask IA for their GOTOMEETING demo. Where they get you on the phone and go thru a lot of information about their product. Very informative.
Next I would also go to the video section of their site and watch the superb videos that have been made concerning configuration and layout designing of their product. Also very informative.
Now as i stated I am not an integrator and this is my first attempt at doing a SCADA system but what I can tell you is that based on all the other products that I got quotes on when first starting out and asked for help, IA is the one that helped out the most and provided and still provides the best technical support around. At least in my opinion. Most of the other companys that I got quotes from was like, well once you purchase it, then we will sell you a contract and will assist you. where my question was how do I know it will work as planned, and they were like, trust us it will work. Where here at IA they used the goto meeting and showed me how well it would work.
Now do they have utilities to convert, I dont know that would be a question to ask them when you call in for your demo and while you have them on the phone.
If you read thru the forum postings on here you will see just how heavy duty this product is. There is one poster in here that says he is collecting something like 8000 tags per sec and is doing so quite well and if I am not mistaken he is in the chemical/refinery type of business.
One of the things that you need to read up on is the terminology of the IA product. Here is what I can tell you and again I am sure there is more but I will leave that to the experts at IA
Kepserver - This is an OPC client to connect to PLC devices
Factory SQL - This is the first part this connects KepServer to a Database such as SQL, Oracle or other. It allows scripting and some advanced features. Again I think there is a video covering this.
Factory PMI - As they claim on here stands for Plant Management Interface. This connects up to Factory SQL and also your database to gather information and present it in a nice graphical format.
SQL tags - These are tags that go directly from OPC thru Factory SQL and then into PMI. More immediate than going thru the database.
Now can it use VB scripts and C scripts, I think so but since I have not used them I will leave the absolute answer to the experts.
Again I will say I am by no means an expert in fact like I said I am very much a beginer but based on what I have seen, their tech support, their training, the videos, the forum groups, I would say they are top notch in their field. And if you have a problem they are always around to help. Again I refer to the posting where one poster was pleasantly surprised he posted and received a responce on a sunday.
I hope this answer some of your questions. again it is my 2 cents but I do hope it helps.
Have a great day.
[quote=“cbabb”]I’d like to get some feedback from users who have used FactoryPMI as a replacement for RSViewSE or some of the other MMI packages out there.
We have some great opportunities to offer FactoryPMI as an alternative package to some of our customers who are either currently looking at RSViewSE or are already using it.
We have an enormous amount of training and experience in developing RSView projects as well as using VBA, and C to provide some additional functionality to that product, and others.
Obviously pricing is very attractive but this also involves some thought on our end in terms of engineering costs and training to come up to speed with FactoryPMI. Also, we know the limitations and many of the gotcha’s on the Rockwell products as well as it’s track record in stability and performance, which for us, has been very good.
Most of our applications are fairly simple. They are stand alone systems. Lots of graphics and trends, PID tuning, etc. as an average, there may be 20-30 screens in each application with 2000-3000 tags, some derived tags, some simple VBA, etc…
Some of our larger systems are distributed applications and may have up to 100 screens, 10,000 tags, animated graphics, some pre-canned faceplates for PID loop tuning and maybe a good amount of VBA for doing some more complicated recipe handling, etc…
What I’m looking for is some information on the following:
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Experience with FPMI as a direct replacement for RSView SE.
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Gotcha’s or things that can be done in RSView but not in FPMI.
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Development differences… As I said, we have LOTS of experience with RSView but none yet with FPMI.
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Is there any re-usability of existing RSView graphical elements? Contrologix faceplates, etc
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Any utilities that would help me convert my RSView tag database over to SQLTags?
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Performance issues or comparisons?
Anything I can learn ahead of time would be very helpful…
Thanks,
Chris[/quote]