Integrator

This recipe management system consisted of two Ignition projects. The first project provided recipe management functionality for supervisors and administrators. The second project provided HMI/SCADA functionality for operators including the ability to select, review, and download recipes. The system consists of approximately 200 recipes. The recipes consist of approximately 20 items. Seven different pieces of equipment are included in the scope of the project. This project replaced an obsolete system providing similar functionality and the 200 recipes were initially created using scripting functions that parsed data from the obsolete system.

The purpose of this project is to provide insight into the client’s manufacturing operation in the food/beverage industry. The client had recently made a very large investment to migrate a significant part of the plant’s mostly manual process to an automated process. Although the investment in automation provided significant improvements, the client still felt like further production efficiency improvements could be made. The client decided to implement an OEE Downtime system to help identify the best opportunities for improvement in the process.

The system architecture consists of two Ignition servers, a tag server and an application server, with data collected from two primary sources - a single ControlLogix PLC and manual data entry. The initial phase of the project included the implementation of approximately 45 individual pieces of equipment arranged into 6 equipment groups making up a single overall production line.

With insights gleaned from the monitoring, reporting, and analysis functions delivered as part of this project, the client was able to identify opportunities and improve throughput of the line by 20-50% within seven months of project completion.

The site for this project consists of a single production line containing 5 different sample collection locations and a lab. The purpose of this project was to replace a legacy SPC system that consisted of a historian and a complex Excel front-end that performed calculations and presented data in various control charts, trend charts, and table formats. The existing system architecture had no connectivity between sites and data retrieval performance was poor. The new system uses Sepasoft’s new SPC 3.0 module including MES enterprise functionality to allow for management of MES resources from a central cloud-hosted corporate server and to allow for synchronization of SPC data between the site server and the central server enabling site-to-site comparisons of process quality characteristics.

Because of the client’s specific requirements, custom SPC data entry windows were created for each sample definition with templates for data entry points that validate entered values and provide immediate feedback to the user.

In addition to the manually entered data, the system also retrieves approximately 800 additional data points from five 3rd party OPC UA servers and stores that data in the Ignition historian. Reporting and dashboard requirements included merging MES and historian data into single reports. Those reporting requirements also included the ability of users to select data points in an ad hoc fashion regardless of the source (MES database or historian) to build reports containing statistical data for the selected data points and materials/products.

The result of the project was a highly performant quality data collection system built with modular components that can be efficiently expanded to include the client’s additional sites for a complete enterprise solution.