AVEVA Production Management 2020 (formerly Ampla) | What’s new with the 2020 release

Posted: June 23, 2020

What's new with AVEVA Production Management 2020

AVEVA Production Management 2020 is a new release with a new AVEVA name for Ampla Operations Management software. This naming taxonomy transition to functional offer naming takes place to simplify the AVEVA portfolio structure and for bringing consistency to product names across the AVEVA portfolio.

What's new in this software release

This release includes exciting new features and enhancements, including user experience improvements, intelligent inventory reprocessing & finalization, simplified configuration of permissions and integrations, support for Windows Server 2019 and SQL Server 2019, and more.

Intelligent Inventory Reprocessing

AVEVA Production Management 2020 adds the ability to reprocess only the pending changes to take the guesswork out of reprocessing your inventory data from a point in time. The system automatically determines the earliest change (new or changed historical data) and reprocesses only what is necessary. This dramatically simplifies the user experience and enables the most efficient reprocessing possible.

This feature is available on-demand from the Client, via the API, and can also be used with automatically scheduled reprocessing.

Evolution of Inventory Finalization

In addition to the inventory reprocessing improvements, this release significantly improves the Inventory Finalization procedures.

• Finalization no longer requires a Full Reprocess. Of course, if there are 'Pending Changes' within the finalization window, you will still need to (and want to!) process them.
• Finalization can occur even with negative/debt lots. Users can override these errors, and additional logging has been added to ensure accurate auditing of these overrides.

To maintain the accuracy and reliability of the data, Movement and Quality Events with errors still need to be addressed prior to finalization.

‘Last Modified By’ in Downtime and Knowledge Modules

Many customers would be familiar with small customization often used to capture the ‘Operator’ who completed a downtime or knowledge record (in addition to the standard Audit Log feature). AVEVA Production Management now includes this as a standard feature called ‘Last Modified By’, alongside the existing ‘Last-Modified’ timestamp field.

Removing the need for this small customization further simplifies your configuration and ensures future upgradeability!

Search, Filter and Define Size of Comment Fields

Comments fields often have important contextual data that you want to search on. This release brings the ability to filter on the Comments field and the ability to increase the number of rows displayed in the details dialog!

Sign-in with Active Directory account on shared Control Room PCs

In some instances, Control Room PCs are shared between multiple operators using the same Windows user account. AVEVA Production Management 2020 now allows users to sign in with their own Active Directory (domain) account. This will dramatically improve the experience for these users, whilst ensuring individual permissions are enforced and audit trails are logged for the individual user despite the use of shared Windows user accounts.

Easier Permissions Management for Administrators

Experienced administrators will know that unchecking the option ‘Use the same permissions as a parent’ when modifying permissions meant you would need to re-add all permissions you wanted to keep. Well not anymore! The default behavior now clones the parent permissions, allowing administrators to simply remove the ones they do not need.

Simplified 3rd Party Integration with Inventory Modules

The popular Plant2Business (P2B) connector has been extended to integrate the Inventory modules with third-party applications via OLEDB to capture Movement Events and Quality Events from external systems such as Fleet Management Systems and Laboratory Systems. This includes the extension of the ‘RequestOrigin’ feature to our P2B connectors, allowing the system to understand the source of new data and support any additional business logic that might be necessary.

Code Items Further Enhanced

The Ampla Operations Management 2018R3 release improved the way Code Items access current and previous values for changed records. This release extends this feature to our Inventory modules, and now provide these values on changes to Movement and Quality Events, as well as Lot and Lot Group records.

Support for Windows Server 2019 and SQL Server 2019

AVEVA Production Management 2020 adds support for Windows Server 2019 and SQL Server 2019 and an update for the supported versions of RabbitMQ.

Performance Improvements

Finally, this release delivers performance improvements by taking advantage of the latest advancements in our supporting frameworks. This release brings significant gains in the areas of:

• Bulk Confirm/Unconfirmed Operations
• SubmitData API (for Inventory Data)
• GetData API