Unified Control Center: Now is the Time, are You Ready?

As you well know, the industry is changing by leaps and bounds. The management costs of automation systems have multiplied in recent years, and we have not yet adopted remote management policies for these systems everywhere.

COVID-19 has unfortunately served as a catalyst for some of these policies, and at least from our side of the business, we have seen massive requests for temporary remote access licenses, to be able to manage the facilities remotely or to enable operators from home to access a control system.

The paradigms have changed in a very short time, and we can no longer justify ourselves with black swans and the fact that we live in a VUCA environment.

If we do not know what awaits us at sea, we will have to think very carefully about the crew we want to accompany us and the captain of the ship we would put in place for this purpose.

A study by LNS Research, a British industrial consulting and analysis company, focused on best practices for digital and operational transformation, as well as technological leadership prospecting, says the following:

“The main concern of customers is no longer the ROI, and the main challenges to achieving production objectives involve greater interdepartmental collaboration, eliminating functional silos, and simplifying the management of automation and control systems.”

With forty years of experience in the market, Wonderware offers value in virtually any industrial sector and in critical infrastructures.
As a result of the experience and continuous improvement over these years, the concept of the UOC is born.

The UOC (Unified Control Center) is here to respond to current paradigms and reinforce Wonderware’s ultimate purpose:

“To help our clients in their digital transformation process, empowering people through technology in order to achieve maximum efficiency and availability, as well as to reinforce cross-functional collaboration between departments.”

And this is nothing more than the integration of the most powerful and proven SCADA platforms with 40 years of experience in the market, with corporate tools, asset management (digital twin), as well as information systems for the end user.

Because after the disruption to which we have been subjected, at least to me, several questions arise:

• What if, with minimal physical resources, we could have a global vision of everything that happens in any of the company’s business areas?
• What would happen if an orchestra conductor could have a complete cross-functional view of the company?
• For example, that different functional areas could be contacted in real time to solve or cover requirements early.
• Or, for example, coordinate maintenance with operations and engineering in real time, also providing the teams involved with plant visibility, contextualized technical information such as plans, SOPs, etc.

I believe that in most companies, we are still not able to see the real costs of the process and there is no real connection between the business and the operation or production part.

However, at Wonderware we have always been committed to promoting a series of basic principles that should allow contextualizing information, analyzing it and extracting knowledge.

The UOC or Wonderware Unified Control Room is here to provide a competitive advantage, not only linked to operations, but from a global vision of the company.

Thanks to our technology, System Platform, InTouch OMI, Skelta BPM, GISIZE, MES / MOM systems, and a whole set of predefined templates among many other applications, the UOC can be created, integrating countless systems managed from a single cross-functional real-time platform.

And, digitalization should be seen as a source of knowledge and a tool for innovation and acceleration of internal processes of companies.

The idea is to change the way we manage the company at the OT level, integrating the information into a system of systems, with the context as the main axis and a visualization adapted to the needs of each of the stakeholders. And we are working to change it!

We are ready and want to travel with all of you. Who’s in?

If you want to expand information, we invite you to watch the video of our presentation “Unified Control Center in the Water Sector” at the Smart Water Summit 2020 by iAgua.

Watch the video