To satisfy requests from one of its customers, Ford, NETCON teamed up with EMT, the producer of VisualPlant, to incorporate wireless messaging into EMT's VisualPlant product. Given the open architecture of NETCON's FirstPAGE Alarm Manager (FPAM) and EMT's VisualPlant, it took less than 3 man weeks to develop an industrial strength solution that is not based on unreliable DDE agent technology or "klugey" RS-232 serial port text matching algorithms that are not able to keep up with any kind of real volume. The solution had to run reliably 24 hrs/day, 7 days/wk.

NETCON will be shipping, at the end of July 2001, the first VisualPlant Edition of FirstPAGE Alarm Manager to Ford Motor Companies Dearborne Plant. NETCON was chosen for the job because of its experience in plant floor communications systems and because of its FirstPAGE suite of proven products. The FirstPAGE suite of products have been providing alarm notification and messaging for General Motors and DaimlerChrysler for over 4 years and are their only corporately endorsed/approved messaging products.

A new FPAM Agent was developed so that VisualPlant Administrators would simply have to install the FPAM Gateway for VisualPlant to page enable their entire application. Along with the FPAM Gateway, a configuration agent was developed for FPAM that takes advantage of VisualPlant's unique system architecture to provide for easy configuration and maintenance.
 

The FirstPAGE Alarm Manager / VisualPlant turnkey solution includes:

• A FPAM  Gateway that runs along side of each VisualPlant application and notifies FPAM as alarms fire and terminate (or get confirmed) via a TCP/IP sockets connection.

• A FPAM Server which receives alarm notifications and dispatches pages based on user-defined rules.

• A FPAM Administrator which allows the user to define who gets paged, how many times, and at what time intervals on an alarm by alarm basis.

• FirstPAGE Server which dispatches pages via in-house paging terminals or commercial carriers.

• Dynamic Alarms
  Complete and dynamic alarm lists, direct from VisualPlant, creates a point and click configuration environment that minimizes typing and thereby reduces errors. This also eliminates the need for alarms to be maintained in multiple applications (ie. VisualPlant and messaging utility).

• Escalation
  5 levels of escalation are available for every alarm to ensure alarms don't get forgotten.

• Termination / Confirmation
  Can optionally send a confirmation page to people previously paged of an alarm letting them know that the alarm has been addressed.

• User Defined Messages
  Users can define custom messages at every level of escalation.

• Rapid Configuration
  Multiple alarms can be configured simultaneously.

• Initial Delay
  Alarms can be configured with an initial delay before messaging begins which handles quick self-correcting variances in the system.

• Shift Work
  A scheduling option is available to make shift work configuration a snap.

• Scalable
  Monitor an unlimited number alarms on an unlimited number of VisualPlant applications from a single server.

• Open
  Generic ODBC and text based agents are available so that messaging from all monitoring applications can be centralized.

• Industrial Strength
  The FPAM engine is a TCP/IP sockets based solution that runs as a Windows NT service. This provides a more robust and stable platform than   other traditional DDE-based and RS-232 serial port-based solutions (ie. server doesn't need to reside within so many feet of the serial port, there is no need to leave a server logged on).

• Remote Management
  The FPAM Administrator can run on any Windows Client workstation so   that administration of the system can be done by multiple administrators right from their desktops.

   
Contact Information:
Sales | Phone: +1.519.652.0401 | Fax: +1.519.652.9275