OREANDA-NEWS. Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that it has greatly enhanced the FieldMate(tm) Versatile Device Management Wizard and will release R3.01 on October 17. FieldMate is a versatile software program for configuring, adjusting, and managing a wide variety of field devices used in factories and other production sites. Starting today, a trial version of R3.01 will be available on Yokogawa's website.

In addition to the device configuration, adjustment, and management functionality provided in earlier FieldMate releases, FieldMate R3.01 comes with new functions that facilitate the management of memos, photos, and videos as well as the automatic generation of reports, making it ideal for routine maintenance tasks.

Digital communications standards are playing an increasingly important role in communications between central control systems and field devices such as transmitters and analyzers. However, as the devices provided by different vendors rely on a variety of digital communications standards, there is a need for a versatile configuration, adjustment, and management tool that can support all the major industry-standard communications protocols. The FieldMate PC software has been developed to meet this very need.

Highly portable devices such as tablets and notebook PCs are now available that facilitate maintenance work in the field. To facilitate such routine tasks as device patrol and maintenance, this new release of the FieldMate PC-based software comes with a variety of new functions.

FieldMate R3.01 runs on PCs (including tablet PCs) that have either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. The new FieldMate can now automatically generate device configuration reports in a variety of data formats. Previously, FieldMate only had the ability to output such data as a text or HTML file, which could then be used in a general-purpose spreadsheet or word processing program to create a report. Typically, manual reporting was very time-consuming because of the large amounts of data involved, with individual devices having anywhere from a few hundred to up to one thousand settings.

FieldMate is a PC-based device configuration tool with an intuitive, user-friendly interface that is used to perform initial setup, routine maintenance, and device replacement. It supports all major industry-standard communication protocols such as FOUNDATION(tm) fieldbus, BRAIN, HART(r), and PROFIBUS(r) as well as the FDT/DTM open software execution framework. In addition, support for the ISA100.11a field wireless communications standard enables the configuration and adjustment of any vendor's network-capable field devices, regardless of which communications protocol is used.