As never before, marketplace competition compels enterprise operators, managers and executives to communicate clearly and fully. At stake is the business’ health and longevity. Real-time remains a catchphrase; seamless, a prayer; vertical integration, a target.
And at the core of the enterprise is the fundamental issue of data flow. This is certainly one of the most critical issues—and a measure of the organization’s well-being. The data pathway may be called shop floor-to-top floor, factory floor-to-board room or -executive suite, even sensor-to-customer connectivity.
Whatever its name, the route involves linked, logical steps. Controllers—whether for process or discrete manufacturing—aggregate data gathered from sensors and operators and send the data to servers for easy retrieval. Applications draw on these databases and translate them into meaningful business information. People who need information can then access just what is needed to perform their critical tasks.
Standing between manufacturing and the executive suite is the Information Technology team. This group holds the view that they are the virtual glue that binds the enterprise together.
Mostly, they’re right. They’re certainly closer to the boardroom, which means they’re closer to the money. They handle everything, from process and production data to financial and material resources.
It is essential that manufacturing and IT collaborate to ensure that the right information gets to the right destinations in the appropriate way. Production information can be correlated with costs and quality. Even downtime can be better forecast through predictive-maintenance tools.
Decision support
As manufacturing engineers and business managers have known for a very long time, historical data identify trends. Those trends supplement “it’s-happening-now” production information. Both support decision-making.
One supplier of process-related systems uses enterprise tools, including middleware and industry standards, to make it possible for its clients to gather data and achieve these vertical-integration goals. A discrete manufacturer installed a comprehensive networking technologies system to do the same.
“Converting technical characteristics of a manufacturing-floor operation to financial characteristics defines factory floor-to-boardroom connectivity,” says Bruce A. Jensen, manager of Yokogawa’s Systems Marketing and Sales Support.
It can start with a seasoned technology that finds factory-floor application in petroleum refining, petrochemicals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other process industries. An example is the company’s Centum CS 3000 R3 distributed control system (DCS) that runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP.
For connection to the enterprise, its information is fed to a process-information-management system or PIMS, he says. “That can be considered a manufacturing execution system or MES.”
His company provides two means to interface factory floor with enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs), such as those provided by SAP, he says. “Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, such as our Stardom, also interface with a PIMS, such as our Exaquantum.”
SAP has PP-PI, its interface module to process systems, explains Jensen, who has 20 years’ experience in operations systems. Part of the linkage, PP-PI is used to gather process data as well as transactional data.
For the higher-level management team, basic measurement data—temperatures, flows, pressures, compositions—must be converted into key performance indicators such as unit utilization, yield or efficiency, percent utilization and inventory costs.
But, says Jensen, users must always ask: Why measure anything? “The only reason is to control, and the only reason you control is to make the process better. It’s the same in the business world. To control performance, you measure performance.” The idea is to optimize utilization, he explains, and therefore optimize performance.
“The most common method we use to exchange this information is object linking and embedding for process control, or OPC. It’s now a de facto industry standard.” Another evolving methodology, he says, is the extensible markup language, or XML, designed for Web-based data exchange. “We’ve used XML for recipe-data exchange, in specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
“We’ve done this because of our involvement in ISA’s (Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society) S88 (batch) and S95 (enterprise) standards. The standards have created the tables for data exchange and basic protocols, called schemas. They’ve taken XML and created standards such as business-to-manufacturing mark-up language. The World Batch Forum’s Batch ML and B2MML are schemas that help with data.”
Important standards
Jensen believes ISA’s S88, S95 and S99 (data security) standards are of predominant importance to the process industries. “I almost consider S88 and S95 to be functional specifications and design documents to assist suppliers in creating products for users.”
For those process industries, Yokogawa has advanced operations tools—middleware connectivity products—that help analyze and automate simple operator tasks to assist managers and, ultimately, executives.
“On the batch side, we have Exabif to assist in exchanging information on batch scheduling. It connects to SAP on one side and our DCS on the other. For petrochemicals and refining, we have the PIMS system as the middleware for data exchange with SAP.”
Their PIMS “is the largest middleware product we have. It becomes a platform for what we call our value-added, industry-specific applications such as production accounting, performance monitoring, environmental monitoring and data reconciliation. They are the applications that take raw data and convert them to information needed by IT and executives.”
It isn’t only batch processing that benefits from connecting shop floor processes to manufacturing business applications. Discrete manufacturers also can realize successes, as well.
At Trane’s Tyler, Texas, plant, which manufactures air conditioners, the company wanted to track data on specific assembly-line machines to give plant-floor operators and management real-time information access to production totals, uptime/downtime and machine performance. Also, the company wanted to reduce product or service failure rates to a negligible level, approximately 3.4 failures per million opportunities. That would allow Trane to reach Six Sigma status.
One main challenge was maintaining production levels. As its first focus, the company chose the spine-fin wrapping section, which had the most potential to disrupt production.
The section contains 60 spine-fin-wrapper machines. Each continually wraps and glues a 0.0005-inch by 1-inch band of metallic ribbon around a 3/8-inch pipe, which runs through the wrapping machine’s center. The finished product is a continuous length of pipe with a ribbon edging or fanning.
Control plus HMI
But analog counters, which once measured the length of produced wrapped pipe, could not measure or capture a machine’s uptime and downtime. Instead of standard programmable logic controller (PLC)-based control to provide those data, however, the company and Tegron, a control-system-design company, chose Rockwell Automation’s Allen-Bradley SoftLogix.
This personal computer-based controller runs on a commercial operating system. It takes control functions found on a dedicated PLC and encapsulates them in software. The system also combined human-machine-interface (HMI) programming, control and enterprise integration—all on a single hardware platform.
Through Allen-Bradley monitors strategically positioned at each bank of wrappers, operators have access to system data and monitor the entire system via operator-interface stations running Rockwell Software RSView32 HMI software.
Linking the wrappers is a Rockwell Automation network architecture consisting of DeviceNet, ControlNet and Ethernet. This combination gives seamless integration throughout assembly. And it enables operators, via monitors or the Internet/Intranet, to view devices’ status as well as the entire production line.
This networking system gave operations managers access to real-time information, through vertical integration. It supported transfer and execution of work instructions and information flow from plant-floor devices to the company’s Intranet or Extranet.
That vertical integration, through MES and ERP systems, allows managers to make better-informed business decisions, such as accelerating deliveries if production is higher than expected.
Achieving Six Sigma meant analysis of production data was necessary. To track and analyze it, an RS historian is used to evaluate each process’ performance. Pre-designed data models are optimized for time-series data. The program connects to any database via open-database connectivity. The historian provides machine output, in feet per minute, downtime statistics and reason codes. Data can be used to determine sources of machine-related issues.
An RS transaction manager, located in the engineering department PC, transfers wrapping-machine information into the database for storage and analysis. The software is an interface between controller and a Microsoft structured-query-language or SQL server database.
Running parallel to the controller-transaction manager-SQL route is a controller-transaction manager-Oracle-Web Server route. It allows production information to be posted on the company Intranet.
At every level, through Trane’s vertically integrated data-collection, analysis and transport system, accessible information is now available. On the factory floor, operators can monitor real-time information on displays and HMI stations. Likewise, engineers can view and analyze information from the databases. From wherever they may be, managers and executives can view and analyze information via the Web.
See sidebar to this article: MES and ERP basics
See sidebar to this article: Ethernet switch catalyzes communications
