The ability to peer into the workings at any of a company’s facilities from afar and view operating data whenever you need it has tremendous value. Just ask IMO Autopflege GmbH, a European car-wash operator based in Muelheim, Germany. Even though its automated facilities offer services rather than products, the company collects and digests the same type of information that manufacturers use to deliver their products faster, better and cheaper. Ready access to such data allows the car-wash operator to rapidly adjust its prices to changing local conditions and to improve service and cut costs by diagnosing and correcting problems remotely.
The central office did not always have immediate access to such data, however. Because the company performs 13 million washes every year at the 285 locations it has in Germany alone, the old manual method of tracking the activity there and at the hundreds of other locations throughout Europe was a major undertaking. Manual entries into accounting software were slow and cumbersome. For this reason, data were dated and limited. The company could not exploit all of the information passing through the 96 digital input ports and 128 analog output ports on each of the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) running its washing lines.
To make use of that data, IMO needed an easier way for tapping into the gold mines of information created as attendants take orders and the PLCs regulate conveyor speed, switch brushes on and off, and coordinate the other activities along the lines that they supervise. So as an increasing number of manufacturers have done for production lines, IMO has turned to Internet technology to link its facilities to its central office and to automate the collecting and monitoring of operating data. In the initial phase, it connected 120 of its facilities to a central personal computer operating on Microsoft Windows NT at headquarters and began exchanging data through software interfaces called Web Services.
These Web Services are communications tools that software developers embed in their software to run behind the scenes and be transparent to users. They are a kind of component-based software technology that packages programmable application logic into a “black box” that any software using it can access through Internet protocols, rather than specific object-model protocols. Software developers using Web Services organize the logic and the data that a Web Service uses around the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and extensible markup language (XML).
“As a vendor, we chose to leverage XML to make our products work together because it is a quicker way to bring products to market,” says Roy Kok, director of HMI/SCADA at GE Fanuc Automation Inc., in Charlottesville, Va., an affiliate of GE Industrial Systems. “It’s a standard that we can apply throughout all of our products, instead of having to invent one of our own.” The result is that GE Fanuc, as well as those of its competitors that also use the technology, can integrate its products more thoroughly and faster.
Get it, use it
Even though users of software do not apply Web Services directly, they are finding Web Services to be of enormous value. As manufacturers installed automation and software in their facilities over the last few decades, they learned that their PLCs, human-machine interfaces (HMIs), and PCs contain tremendous amounts of information that could be valuable—if only they could access it quickly without a lot of effort and expense. Web Services solve this problem, helping them to collect and package for use the wealth of information that would otherwise sit in these disparate databases. They reach into these databases, pick out the relevant information, and display it automatically in a report that employees can read and understand.
In IMO’s case, the Web Services are built into Cimplicity HMI, the monitoring and control element in the Proficy Intelligent Productions Solutions family of applications from GE Fanuc. Through the Web Services running behind the scenes, the software reaches into each PLC every night to retrieve the number of cars washed on the line it supervises, the wash programs selected, and 500 pieces of operating data collected at various points of the line. Analysts at the head office then pore over the statistics the next day and glean useful information about the business and the equipment.
One fruit of the Web Services in the Cimplicity HMI is a Trend Control tool based on ActiveX technology. This tool collects the appropriate operating data and business statistics for analysis and evaluation and displays them in “point-and-click” screens for evaluation and optimization. Automating this task eliminates the manual entry of operating data and the creation of daily reports. It not only gives the operator more time to offer customers better service, but also eliminates reading errors, thus improving the efficiency and quality of the administration, according to Hans-Ludwig Hiller, a spokesman for IMO.
Another fruit of Web Services is the ability to grab data from anywhere on the network. IMO’s technicians, for example, can monitor the switching states of the PLCs automating the equipment at any facility and either modify or correct problems from a PC screen at the main office. Before IMO installed its intranet, system failures often required the company to dispatch technicians to visit the car washes having problems to troubleshoot and solve the problems on-site. The intranet and the software running on it eliminate much of this downtime and expense.
Because of the success that IMO has had with retrieving data, Hiller reports that the company plans to add more of its car washes to the network systematically as it upgrades the PLCs at the facilities not linked initially.
Installing a new intranet is not always necessary to reap the benefits of Web Services, however. Software vendors often use Web Services as a means for streamlining upgrades of their products and for laying new products on top of old ones already on an existing intranet. The ability to interact with existing software was important to Devon Energy Corp., an Oklahoma City-based natural gas producer that has operations from Montana and Wyoming to Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Although the company’s gas control operation monitors its other operations 24-hours a day over the corporate intranet, the local people were the only ones who had immediate access to the information. Anyone wanting to know what a site was doing had to either wait for a report or get on the phone to ask for whatever information he or she wanted.
Groups of employees—superintendents, managers and engineers—rely on this data. Because of the decentralized nature of the business, these people can be several hundred miles away from the gas plants, delivery points, pipelines and wells generating the data that they are using. Even when they are on site, the facility can be so large that the operator can be monitoring equipment that is a half-mile away. In some cases, a small, untended facility relies on someone offsite to monitor its activity and keep tabs on such things as pressure, flow rate, tank levels and the operating status of the equipment.
Portal power
To give more employees immediate access to its various data repositories across the country, the gas company installed Suite Voyager, a Web portal from Wonderware Corp., an Invensys company based in Lake Forest, Calif. Although the Web Services embedded in the software allow it to read information from most ADO/ODBC (ActiveX Data Objects/Open Database Connectivity) and SQL (structured query language) databases, Devon installed the portal on top of the software vendor’s InTouch graphical windows software that it already was using on its intranet. Now, anyone with the appropriate security clearance can use the portal to reach across the network into any device’s controller, extract the desired information, and place it into a report in a useful format.
For example, a low-flow sensor or oil-pressure switch might alert an operator that a compressor has failed. Maintenance can dispatch someone to repair it and sometimes even troubleshoot the problem beforehand so the technician can come prepared. Meanwhile, the supervisor can monitor progress on the repairs from anywhere in the company and even from home.
“Rather than waiting for a report to be published or making a phone call, engineers, superintendents and managers can get near real-time data and know exactly what is happening at a particular location at any given time,” says Kathy Carrizales, SCADA systems coordinator at Devon. “Giving them access to real time information frees up our gas controllers to do what they’re hired to do—to monitor the system—instead of reporting to people.” Moreover, the people needing the information can see it firsthand, rather than relying on someone else’s interpretation.
The portal runs on a Microsoft Windows 2000 server and collects the information through the corporate intranet built on a wide area network and the InTouch software. Sensors, PLCs and other local computers make the data that they collect available to the Internet by radio transmission, dial-up modems and other links to the wide area network. An XML exporter on the InTouch software sends both the data it collects and the screens that already existed to SuiteVoyager for publishing on the intranet. Although the network and XML links would allow sending data in the other direction to the controllers for controlling equipment remotely, management decided against activating this feature as a security precaution.
Because Web Services are at the heart of the portal, the portal was easy not only to install but also to use. When Carrizales received the software, she created a server and installed the software in an afternoon. “At the time that I put this server together, I had no experience with Windows 2000,” she says. “So I installed the operating system, using the documentation and some resources from Wonderware.”
Easy setup
Publishing the pages containing the reports on the intranet took a little longer than an afternoon, however. She had to work with the managers and supervisors needing the information in deciding on how to organize the pages. For this reason, the initial set of reports took a few weeks to organize and publish. Because creating and modifying reports is easy, many reports have been revised, and the number of reports published has increased. Since installing the portal three years ago, Carrizales has produced between 75 and100 pages. “We still add and take away from the design,” she says. “It’s an ongoing process.”
Even though vendors rely on Web Services mostly to pass data between their own software (OPC tends to be better at linking applications from various vendors; see the story on this topic on p. 47 of this issue), the technology is proving to be of tremendous value at Devon Energy and elsewhere. “It has improved our business by disseminating information that was once held in one place to more people so they can make better decisions faster,” concludes Carrizales. The ability to peer into their processes at will gives people the ability to optimize productivity and maximize profits.
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