Emerson today announced new connections for Plantweb Optics, the asset performance platform for the Plantweb™ digital ecosystem, that will help organisations take the next step in their digital transformation to a more efficient, reliable operation.

The latest release adds connectivity to computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) to create, prioritise, execute and track actions. It also includes a native historian for deeper analysis, and additional connectivity to plant floor data sources.

Effective predictive maintenance strategies demand that operations teams can efficiently respond to the most urgent issues in the plant. By integrating with IBM Maximo and SAP CMMSs, Plantweb Optics becomes a single platform where personnel can see operational issues, collaborate on a solution, and manage maintenance response, parts ordering, scheduling, and work order execution – enabling a fully automated workflow loop for reliability from the prediction of problems to the execution of prescribed, preventative tasks to avert failure.

The native historian provides operators and reliability teams with the ability to validate maintenance and operational response based on past asset behaviour and assess future performance of the asset. Now coupled with the automated workflows to their CMMS, personnel can more efficiently respond to reliability issues that affect production and ensure critical issues don’t go unresolved.

Plantweb Optics is also expanding the supported asset classes by adding access to Plantweb Insight applications, another component of the Plantweb digital ecosystem. The edge analytics provided on steam traps, pumps, and heat exchangers is channelled to the operations team, so they can determine effective strategies for these essential assets.

“Connection between operations and enterprise systems is a requirement to digitally transform your operation,” said Peter Zornio, chief technology officer, Emerson Automation Solutions. “By providing better workflows between systems and leveraging performance analysis, organisations can move away from often unsafe and inefficient run-to-failure reliability approaches to strategies based on insight and analytics.”

With this new release, Plantweb Optics expands its view of asset health - connecting more applications to one centralised location for better insight into asset and plant health. The asset performance platform helps customers improve reliability and promotes Operational Certainty, Emerson’s programmatic approach aimed at helping customers define and implement pragmatic strategies for improving performance.