Aspen Technology, Inc. (AspenTech; Burlington, Mass.) announced today that the new version of their CPI-oriented supply-chain-management software, aspenONE v2006.5, is compliant with Microsoft (MS) Windows Vista and functionally integrated with MS Office Excel and MS Application Virtualization.
For process managers to optimize manufacturing performance, the ability to monitor their plant continuously, and deliver timely guidance to a large operational workforce, requires simplification of IT rollout and management. The new compliance with Vista provides support for customers migrating to the new Microsoft desktop platform, an important concern as AspenTech reports that operations teams in over 200 client firms use their engineering suite with Excel. "By incorporating the latest Microsoft technologies into the integrated suite of aspenONE applications," Microsoft’s director of worldwide manufacturing operations, Chris Colyer, said in a public statment, "AspenTech enables process manufacturers to take full advantage of our combined technology solutions."
Intended to integrate and optimize engineering, manufacturing and supply chain operations, version 2006.5 takes full advantage of Microsoft’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform — building off of the firm’s support of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and SQL Server. MS Application Virtualization allows the entire suite of aspenONE desktop products to become on-demand and centrally managed virtual services; accelerating the deployment of engineering applications as they are installed only once, rather than once per desktop. It also allows different versions of the same applications to run concurrently on the same machine. With the expanded integration between MS Office Excel and aspenONE’s engineering suite, process industry companies can view original design specifications alongside realtime plant performance to troubleshoot and catch process deviations within a suitable timeframe.
Previous versions of the software have been mentioned in the pages of CE with respect to trends in global supply chain management, and advances in process modeling and simulation.