There has been a fascinating power struggle on
Maui, one of the islands in the Hawaiian archipelago. If you are a process manufacturer such as Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (HCSC), your operations can suffer when your regional electrical supply varies. And on
Maui, it can vary far more than with mainland utilities. Wind farms feed the grid, and any time that wind power exceeds 10 percent of total power, the AC frequency follows the frequency of the windmills. When AC frequency wanders, motors behave badly, induction heaters go out of spec and, in general, efficiency becomes elusive.

HCSC makes Maui brand Hawaiian Raw Sugar using 100 percent cane sugar grown on its own, 37,000-acre central
Maui plantation. The company extracts cane juices, retaining some of the natural molasses in the sugar crystals. The result is more flavorful than refined white sugar, bringing enhanced sweetness to beverages, cereals, baked goods and recipes. The company also sends raw sugar to
California to be refined into white sugar and molasses sold by partners.

Cane grinding, juice extraction and boil-down are performed at the company’s mill situated near Puunene,
Maui

John Rivera, power management analyst for HCSC, came to Hawaii from the
Midwest. When he joined HCSC, he soon developed a drive for action developed from working for the steel industry and seeing mill after mill closed. “We are the last independent sugar plantation and refinery in the state,” he says, “and we need every bit of efficiency that we can squeeze out of operations.”

The company itself is not slow to modernize, but when Rivera came on board, the electrical generation side was essentially stuck in the mid-1900s. Data connectivity was not part of the picture, and information from conventional metering and relay-based distribution was not able to give timely warning of power glitches, sags and failures. “Our manufacturing intelligence application began in the power plants,” Rivera says. “We learned how devices with common protocols like Modbus could talk to each other—and to us. Within three years, we had upgraded to a fully digital Wonderware InTouch HMI [human/machine interface] system.”

The power group was then able to monitor electricity from both its own plants and the
Maui grid. The intelligence fueled energy projects that whittled away at inefficiencies. The foundation for the projects lay in the ready availability of key indicators of power. “When you’re making energy decisions, there is a lot to consider,” Rivera says. “You have to confirm that you have correct data, so data accuracy plays a key part. You have to see how effective a governor is, for example, when you apply it to correct a situation. Above all, you have to gather everything you can on AC frequencies and currents. And, it’s good for us to keep tabs on when we have excess energy capacity, because we generate a fair amount of income by selling power back into the
Maui grid.”

As a result, Rivera has overseen the installation of Web-based, company-wide intranet systems that provide real-time visibility to supervisors, managers and line employees in a variety of areas. “I have a strong belief that when you open information to the masses, you allow everyone to become part of the picture,” Rivera says. “It takes all sorts of functionality and all sorts of approaches to piece together the whole picture. The more people who are available to help, available to analyze and support, the better the bottom line.”

The context for manufacturing intelligence is easy. Set a goal. Create a road map for reaching that goal. Set checkpoints along the way, then use manufacturing intelligence to poll those points as you drive by. Manufacturing intelligence can also help when you reach your destination by looking in the back of the truck to see that all your cargo is still there. And, it can do a walk around just to see if the wheels are still on.

There is no rigorous, single definition of manufacturing intelligence. The term itself derives from military intelligence, which gathers information from all possible sources, legal and illegal, ...