Propal Paper Production had a problem with its plant in Valle del Cauca,
Colombia. The only data the plant had on its paper production was stamped on the end of each reel and was never stored electronically. With limited access to data, the company couldn’t make timely and efficient decisions or meet customer requirements accurately. These limitations hurt the company’s ability to compete.

Plant managers decided to solve the problem by interfacing the plant’s quality control system, supplied by automation vendor ABB, with a manufacturing execution system (MES) supplied by Honeywell, another automation vendor. This would connect the data from three paper machines at the Valle de Cauca site and also connect with a machine at a remote site. The real-time data would then be available to corporate decisions makers. The data also had to be secure.

There were two ways to create the connectivity. One was to use custom, vendor-specific protocols and write proprietary interfaces. Another option was to use OPC, an open connectivity standard. The advantage of OPC is that it is inexpensive and easy to use. It is quick to integrate and it provides a secure environment.

Propal chose the MatrikonOPC Transporter to transfer historical data and the MatrikonOPC Tunneller to provide secure connectivity between systems. The off-the-shelf OPC tools eliminated any need to reconfigure existing information technology (IT) infrastructure. “OPC lets anything talk with anything. It lets you use any tool you like by any vendor,” says Steve Pearlstone, technical consultant at Matrikon Inc., of
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

The result, according to Mario Lopez, process control manager at Propal, was low-cost connectivity with no vendor-specific protocols or proprietary interfaces. The plants now have 6,000 data points connected that are updated every 30 seconds. With the wide connectivity, paper production is becoming increasingly efficient.

Plants are beginning to adopt OPC and the more recent OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) standard to connect plant-to-plant applications as well as plant-to-enterprise applications. The OPC standard is non-proprietary, inexpensive and it can tie a wide range of applications together. OPC was developed 12 years ago by a handful of companies in the automation industry under the authority of the OPC Foundation, in
Scottsdale, Ariz. Three years ago, a group of 35 companies supported the foundation’s development of OPC-UA, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based version. OPC-UA allows communication on the enterprise level and connectivity across the Internet. Foundation members now predict that in 10 years, every device will have OPC built in.

There are a number of reasons that companies are seeking greater connectivity across plant and enterprise applications. For one, various systems within the plant itself need to be connected in order to achieve optimum efficiency. “The plant has islands of automation,” says Todd Stauffer, PAS manager, Siemens
Energy & Automation Inc., in Alpharetta, Ga. “To run the business best, the enterprise has to have data from all those islands, and it has to be able to push enterprise information back down to the plant.”

The drive to connect internal plant applications and plant-to-enterprise applications comes from the desire to drive costs out of manufacturing. “In order to optimize production, plants want to make the most with the least. Raw materials, energy costs and the cost of the manufacturing process itself go into the cost of the product,” says Stauffer. “If you can connect applications and get a view of the plant’s operation, you can make the difference as to whether the company is profitable. That’s how thin the margins are.”

Real-time information can help plants move from bulk production to on-demand, just-in-time manufacturing, which is more in line with customer needs. “With this information, decisions can be made at the higher level of the enterprise,” says Mike Panaleano, product manager for the software group, at vendor Rockwell Automation Inc., in
Milwaukee. Visibility into plant operations can help companies make the transition to demand-based manufacturing. “Plants are no longer going to make stock. Now products have to be made-to-order,” says Panaleano. “It’s important that you’re not making cars that are dead on the lot.”

Timely decisions

Another big reason for connecting the plant to the executive suite is to make the company more competitive across a global market. “The modern chief executive officer (CEO) wants to be able to make decisions in a timely fashion, getting the most out of the IT and assets,” says Sean Leonard, director of the Matrikon OPS unit. “The global environment is shrinking and the CEO has to make decisions quicker ...