Cimplicity vs. RSVIEW

My company is implementing SAP. One of our tasks is to replace our legacy system interfaces to Allen-Bradley PLC5 and PLC5/250s as well Modicon 984 PLCs. Our plan is to use some sort of Middleware to accomplish this. One of our plants already using Cimplicity Plant Edition 6.0 but we have been asked to also look at RSVIEW. I wanted to see if someone had some thoughts on which of these 2 products would be best at taking data downloaded from SAP, looking up parameters in the middleware (Cimplicity or RSVIEW) and then forwarding onto the PLCs. We would also retrieve info back to the middleware and want the software to have good analysis tools.

Any thoughts on these 2 products.

Thanks, Bill Harrison

I have no personal experience with RSView, but I can tell you that Cimplicity is a very powerful package with plenty of features and it should be able to do everything you've described. My biggest problem with Cimplicity is that there's nothing 'Cimple' about it. Because it's capable of doing so much, it can be overly complicated when it comes to doing simple tasks.

One concern that I would have about RSView would be its ability to communicate with multiple brands of PLC (AB and Modicon). Because of Rockwell's market dominance, every vendor of HMI or SCADA software has to be able to communicate with AB products. For the same reason, Rockwell has been able to get away without having to give products like PanelView the ability to communicate with non-AB PLCs. Consequently, Rockwell doesn't have as much experience in resolving communications issues with other brands.

FYI,
Panelview does support Modbus comm. and RSview can communicate with
just about any PLC with third party drivers such as Kepware OPC drivers. I'am an Intellution user myself but have seen a demo on RSView and I liked what I saw.

RSView is primarily for HMI. You will have to write your own VB scripts or call other external programs to transfer data to and from an external database (typically Oracle with SAP, I believe). The 'analysis' tools in RSView are RSTrend and the SPC/SQC option. RSView uses RSLinx for comms and there are drivers available for most brands of PLC.

Rockwell's preferred method for transferring data between PLC's and databases is to use RSSQL. This product operates between RSLinx and either MS SQL server or Oracle. You need to create supporting SQL procedures within the database. The add-on RSHistorian provides logging and some analysis.

SAP and AB

Rockwell has interface programs developed for data transfer with SAP using RSSQL.RSView is not required. The tag database from RSView can be accesed via DDE, NETDDE and OPC for export to and from OPC compliant programs. Are you trying to export data such as production numbers to SAP or bring data from SAP into the PLC's? SAP has a module to get tags from live sources that can be used. The SAP end has been more of a problem than the PLC for me in dealing with the IT department. Good luck.