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PRESS RELEASE: Since the acquisition of MinVu by RPM in February this year, the product is now part of RPM's suite of Enterprise solutions.
The major focus has been on integration with RPM's Enterprise Planning Framework (EPF), which allows for a standardised exchange of information between RPM and third-party products. While integration with EPF directly benefits MinVu, the rest of RPM's product suite is also enhanced as the products are able to utilise all of the actuals data that has been captured and stored.
Michael Baldwin, executive general manager of product strategy at RPMGlobal, stated: "With this first release we wanted to do something really big to demonstrate the value of the MinVu product. When you are talking about combining two software companies that have each been around for more than 25 years that has equated to a huge amount of development that all our products can now use to their advantage."
Specific integration was completed with XECUTE and AMT, RPM's short-term planning and asset management solution. Both XECUTE and AMT utilise machine specific information captured and validated by MinVu.
MinVu currently has connectors to all major operational capture systems, giving it the largest library of any solution commercially available. This includes all major fleet management systems and high precision GPS vendors.
MinVu 5.0 also now includes a new module called Shift Manager which delivers true intelligent short interval control (SIC) to the market. RPMGlobal has been developing a short interval control solution since 2016 after it acquired a shift management software product.
Baldwin explained: "The software was reliant on manual data and had some pretty basic reporting, so we immediately looked for ways to automate the entry of actuals information and deliver a rich analytic user experience. The combination of this previous acquisition, MinVu, EPF and our planning expertise is real a game changer in the short-term control space as nothing else in the market has the complete solution."
MinVu provides automation and hence a higher level of accuracy through the many operational data connectors and validation engines. It also has hundreds of reports and dashboards which are configurable out of the box and delivered through web, mobile, email and other visual display methods. MinVu is a tested and trusted solution that is used every day at sites all around the world.
Baldwin said: "The result is Shift Manager, a tool that manages the plan around the tasks, people and resources required to complete the shift. MinVu automatically provides the feedback of actuals data captured by operational systems and a rich decision support data to produce a short interval control system. Shift Manager then highlights deviations from the plan and provides the tools for course corrections to ensure shift and long-term plan compliance."
On top of the integration development within this release, RPM has focused on the end user experience. The release has added more than 100 core improvements that address speed and usability giving the end user a far better experience. Last of all, MinVu 5.0 comes with a major cosmetic facelift to the user interface bringing a fresh, new feel to the software in line with RPM's other products.
Baldwin concluded: "Everyone at RPM is really proud of what we have delivered with this release. MinVu has some really passionate users and this release provides speed and user enhancements across the board so we are expecting some great feedback from our customers."