Yokogawa Releases FAST/TOOLS® R10.01 Web-based Enterprise Operations Solution

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces the release of FAST/TOOLS® R10.01 – the latest version of a web-based real-time operations management and visualization software package that brings revolutionary changes to real-time process information intelligence. This enterprise operations solution introduces breakthrough architectural features that significantly enhance efficiency and security and improve the operational agility of remote process management infrastructure.

Development Background
The enterprise operations and supervisory solutions market continues to grow, and a number of market research reports have identified increasing demand for the integration of various disciplines and functions that deliver operator-centric information solutions.
The introduction of more smart devices, with 200 parameters per device now the norm, and the current trend toward consolidating operations across dispersed assets over large geographical areas, has resulted in mind boggling quantities of data. Some striking numbers emerge: only 5% of this data is transferred into meaningful information, only 10% is relationally structured, and more than 50% is poor in quality. To really capitalize on the extensive data that is gathered, customers need to think about their information strategy. The requirements for an enterprise-wide operations management solution are driving the need for collaboration and information sharing across different platforms, systems, geographies, and corporate networks. This aims to provide the opportunity, with the underlying technology and network, to seamlessly connect devices and applications, while managing them as a single system from an operations, engineering, and maintenance point of view.

Recognizing that most enterprises will take a hybrid approach to management and control solutions, Yokogawa wants to help customers utilize their application investments and transform data into meaningful information by providing a transparent environment which can integrate multi-tier architectures and a variety of sources that can be accessed and shared globally.

Main Features
1.    Enabling the adoption of enterprise solutions
To help build process information infrastructure that delivers continuous services and applications across several enterprise levels, this new solution empowers companies to create enterprise-wide information management centers without boundaries using FAST/TOOLS for high-scale deployment. Multiple layers can be used within a single organization, with organic data exchange between these layers. An enterprise operation module is responsible for gathering the data across several levels on different servers and allows for supervision at the upper layer single operator console. For this the system establishes the optimal path for accessing data that is to be presented to the user. It tries to find alternative paths to the data if access to a certain server is temporarily interrupted. A rule based authorization model authorizes a user to perform certain operational tasks, with an enterprise user being able to obtain information from multiple servers and a local user obtaining data from a local server. Template based graphics and object oriented structures can have local or enterprise properties, eliminating the need for time consuming distribution mechanisms.
2.    Information model (process hierarchy)
The requirements for enterprise-wide process automation solutions are driving the need for any-to-any "collaboration" across different platforms, geographies, and corporate networks. To make sense out of the ever increasing volume of data, Yokogawa