Life–Cycle Management with Excellence

Related Vendors

DÜPERTHAL Sicherheitstechnik GmbH & Co. KG

A completely new and much leaner DTM could have been produced faster, would have been easier to test and would have created less work and expenditures. Many manufacturers decided to go this easier way.

However, the required downward compatibility is lost. What does this mean for users? With other suppliers, it can mean in many cases that the customer needs a new DTM for every new piece of hardware in a product series, and of course the new DTM has to be installed too. In extreme cases, there may be different drivers even within a single instrument series. The result: one may see in the product catalog lots of DTMs listed for the same instrument, and be able to distinguish them only by means of their version numbers.

At worst, somebody has to go to the site to verify the instrument, production year, hardware version and/or serial number. This is additional engineering work that generates unnecessary extra expenditures.

Life–Cycle Management: As Simple as Possible

But it doesn’t have to be this way. With Vega equipment, the user doesn’t have to know which instrument generation he has in his system and which DTM he can use for it. If he mixes new and old instruments, which is a common practice, he can operate all of them via one single, central DTM. Through this one DTM, he can uniformly access all generations of the plics instrument family.

Because one DTM supercedes the other cleanly and completely. The customer notices nothing of this – except perhaps that the new one has a couple of functions more. The advantage: no longer do several different DTM versions with comparable functionality have to be kept simultaneously on the PC. The costly upkeep of software versions can thus be dispensed with. Compatibility makes life easier for users, quite considerably, in fact – a huge plus for the ‘yellow ones.’

If Operators Had Their Way, A Plant Would Run Unchanged for 20 Years...

If operators had their way, a chemical plant would run 20 years without any changes. This thought is clearly expressed in the NAMUR recommendation NE105, ‘Requirements for the Integration of Fieldbus Devices in Engineering Tools.’ In other words: a DTM must remain compatible in all directions as long as possible.

(ID:36446390)