Aspen Technology headquartered in Bedford offers AspenONE Engineering to refineries as a software design aid, emphasizing process optimization and cost control.
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RS2
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Rocscience offers RS2, an engineering application for the oil and gas industries that build models of rock and soil, steady-state finite element groundwater seepage analysis, and other analyses.
In enterprises where another project is tailored to the needs of the client rather than using basic tools. And where the estimate requires comprehensive cost buckets for production operations. When there is a large amount of purchasing history to enter into AspenONE Engineering in order for it to provide reliable projections. Standard equipment manufacturing enterprises are not well suited. Also, because this instrument requires time, when there are time limitation and resource or human limitations.
RS2 is well suited if you are looking for a system that allows you to control and monitor access to your buildings to keep them secure. It provides good visibility of the current status of doors and also allows you to set alarms to notify you of various events. RS2 also gives you the flexibility to set local administrators that only control doors at their location.
RS2 gives you a good view of the current status of your doors from the RS2 Access It! application.
It allows you to assign permissions to admin users, so you can restrict them to only seeing the doors at their location. You can also restrict the modules they see and whether they can view, edit, and delete.
The system allows you to schedule door activities through timezones (i.e., set door x to unlocked from 8:00 am until 8:15 am Monday through Friday) to automate door activities.
The Event Listing report is configurable and allows you to see an individual user, groups of users, a single door, groups of doors, a specific flag (i.e., access granted, access denied, timezone activated, etc).
You can program macros to set ad hoc door activities.
The system allows you to import a building map marking all of the doors with access readers. You can also carry out ad hoc activities from the access readers on the map (i.e., set door to unlocked for x minutes, set door to unlocked until x o'clock, etc).
It has flexible inputs that we integrate with other notification systems for doing lock down from a panic button, so all doors lock when the button is activated.
The reporting is somewhat customizable, but not easy to work with. Most of the pre-packaged reports have been useless to us.
One of the biggest drawbacks is that the schedule does not use a calendar, so if you set and automated event for Monday through Friday, it is every Monday through Friday. There is a way to set a holiday to prevent an automated schedule from running on a certain day, but it is not easy to work with. A calendar view with exceptions would be much better.
On rare occasion, if one of the controllers has their network connection briefly disrupted, they do not come back online until we power cycle the controller. The doors still maintain their security, but you cannot make any changes or updates until you power cycle.
We began assessing several tools when we began estimating for a full process plant or various styles of equipment. We also investigated implementing an ERP system used by the sales and item engineering departments.
Their annual support renewal is very high compared to others and they will not provide any support without the contract. We tend to work through our re-seller for support. They are trained, but still need to contact RS2 support for some issues and even if they open a support case, RS2 will not talk directly with us. They have been able to resolve most issues, but still have not determined why certain controllers do not recover if there is a network disruption.
Again answering from the ACCE perspective (Estimating tool) - Previously when we did estimates for simple equipment we had used excel estimates and lotus reporting. However, as we started estimating for an entire process plant or various style of equipment, we had started evaluating various tools. We had also considered using an ERP system that is utilized by Purchasing and Product Engineering teams, however, ACCE seemed a better fit for the amount of detailed estimating needed. And the robustness and various options available made us select this tool.
We compared RS2 to the Hirsh Identiv Velocity system. The Velocity system did not allow us to schedule door access easily and was difficult to integrate with other systems. The Velocity management interface was cumbersome and did not allow us the flexibility of scripting door settings. With Velocity it was not easy to monitor or make changes to door status.
It is hard to measure ROI because an access security system does not generate any revenue. It was implemented to secure our buildings and help protect students and staff.
It has positively impacted our business from a safety standpoint. It allows us to secure our buildings.
RS2 also integrates well with other systems to allow us to lock down our buildings in the event of a severe external threat.
