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Five Ways to Increase Your Automation Game via Controls Migration Without Decreasing Employee Morale

In the industrial manufacturing sector, the term “automation” often raises concerns about job security. However, when done properly, modernizing your facility is more about empowering your workforce than replacing them. By implementing a strategic controls migration, you can enhance your processing capabilities to meet your company’s goals without harming team morale. A successful migration shifts the focus from outdated, frustrating equipment to intuitive, flexible systems that make daily tasks safer and more efficient.

Here are five ways to elevate your automation strategy while keeping your workforce engaged and confident.

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From Pen Chart Recorder to Digital: Making the Transition with Confidence

For decades, the pen chart recorder has been a cornerstone of process documentation in manufacturing plants across the pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and oil and gas industries. These mechanical workhorses have delivered reliable, tamper-proof records that meet regulatory standards while offering real-time insights into vital process parameters. However, as your workforce changes and regulatory standards advance, you might be wondering whether it’s time to switch from your trusted pen chart recorder to a modern digital solution—and whether such a move can truly satisfy the strict compliance demands of your operations.

The Proven Legacy of Mechanical Chart Recorders

Your pen chart recorder has served you well. These devices have become fixtures in manufacturing environments because they deliver exactly what regulated industries require: permanent, visual records of process conditions that prove compliance with key manufacturing parameters. Whether you’re recording temperature profiles during sterilization cycles, monitoring storage conditions for controlled substances, or documenting transportation environments, mechanical chart recorders have provided the tamper-proof historical record that regulatory agencies require.

The physical chart itself acts as powerful evidence—a tangible artifact that quality assurance teams, auditors, and regulatory inspectors can examine to confirm that your processes stayed within specifications. This simplicity and reliability have established the pen chart recorder as the standard for compliance documentation in many regulated industries. (more…)

Normalizing Material Delivery – Dry Ingredients

Batch recipes are often created considering a fixed amount of dry ingredients and liquids. Many dry products used in recipes are moist, featuring a measured amount of dry products and water. This poses a challenge for batch operators who mix the ingredients using assumed ingredient quantities and qualities.

Source vessels hold ingredients, the properties of which can be analyzed and noted by using batch automation. ECS Solutions, a Magnum Systems brand, utilizes systems that can leverage theoretical values as a foundation for operation. After receiving or analyzing the ingredient’s moisture levels, the system can be updated to reflect the most accurate moisture content.

Challenges arise when ingredients are stored for extended periods, resulting in moisture changes. Additional difficulties crop up when multiple lots of the same ingredient are stored together in a vessel like a silo, each containing a unique moisture content. Upon release into a batch, this problem can be exacerbated if the lots blend, resulting in a close but not exact moisture content sent to the batch.

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The Top Five Benefits of Tuning PID Loops in Process Control Systems

Process control systems are the backbone of efficient and reliable manufacturing operations, ensuring predictability, stability, and optimized performance across various industries. Whether managing the precise control of temperatures, pressures, or flow rates, these systems play a vital role in delivering consistent output, reducing waste, and upholding safety standards. At the heart of many process control systems lies the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) loop—a powerful mechanism that, when properly tuned, can drive significant benefits for manufacturers.

Let’s examine the five key reasons why tuning PID loops is essential for improving your process control systems.

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Large Scale SCADA Migration using Ignition coupled with the Perspective Module

ECS Solutions, Inc., recently completed a large-scale SCADA migration for a fortune 500 food manufacturing client. This upgrade was noteworthy based on the size of the facility-wide project and the fact that it was executed using Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform coupled with the Perspective visualization module as the basis of design. This client has embarked on an enterprise-wide modernization effort which will enable them to maintain and monitor their dozens of facilities. In many ways, this made possible by rapid advancements in plant floor hardware and computing software, commonly referred to as Industry 4.0.

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Manual Ingredient Additions – Confirmation and Tracking

ECS Solutions, Inc. (ECS), worked with a world leader in nutritional products to tie together the most critical software tools used in their dry ingredient manufacturing. This project merged the capabilities of the existing inventory tracking system with the robust batch processing capabilities in the company’s final assembly area.

The client’s existing inventory management system is a reliable platform which facilitates comprehensive materials tracking, complete with connectivity to their SAP ERP. The final assembly area FactoryTalk View batching system is a prompt-driven batching application designed to steer operators towards the successful assembly of mixes. The overarching goal of this project was to further enhance the consistency in product mixing actions by every operator. ECS tied, the tried and tested inventory tracking functions of the inventory management application, to the programmatic and physical control points provided by the batching control system. The results are streamlined operations for mixing personnel, non-invasive enforcement of the mixing steps and procedures, and more complete data records regarding specific ingredient usage and batch performance.

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Embedded Engineers as Trusted Advisors

The legacy walls between areas and disciplines inside of a manufacturing plant have melted away, leaving behind a complex, inter-woven tapestry of interconnected workers and departments. The speed at which technology advances inside of plants would make it nearly impossible for most organizations to support all systems via internal personnel. The internal support teams of today are smaller than they once were while the reliance on the plant tech has grown. The tasks of hiring, training, and then retaining highly technical talent in IT, engineering, general maintenance have become more difficult.

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Benefits of a Campaign Manager

Batch processing facilitates the repetitive, tightly controlled manufacture of many things. This type of operation is ideal for large scale manufacturing where products are assembled and modified in a series of stages or steps. When connected to a batch management software system, the number of ingredients, execution stages, and degree of processing complexity which can be handled by relatively unsophisticated operators can be extraordinary. The typical end results for manufacturers are lower cost per unit products with tight quality control and meticulous records of production.

Enterprise resource and scheduling systems are ubiquitous to modern manufacturing organizations. These are frequently mated to plant floor automation systems. For simple batch operations with savvy operators this task can be straightforward, particularly when aided by a batch management solution. However, in operations that require rapid processing or changeover between many in-progress batch orders, this can be challenging. The same is true if batch processing requirements for a single order are large in either complexity or an amount of time that spans beyond the purview of a single operator or team. Integration between the master resource and scheduling system and the batch operating environment can be enhanced using a campaign manager.

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Batch Forensics: Additional Report Parameters Enhance Process Performance

Understanding your process performance starts with having unambiguous data that is contextualized. This data provides information that quantifies and qualifies the different aspects that provide insight into the overall system performance. This data ends up in a repository and gets analyzed to produce actionable information and these reports may look at different aspects of the activities required to make products or to clean the equipment. By looking at the process from the ISA 88 and ISA95 point of view, we are able to provide additional context to the information for which the basic activities are reporting.

Additional information may be added to provide more insight into the activities related to:

Quality – (amounts, tolerances, durations, temperatures, lethality, etc.)
Cost- (materials, energy, personnel, equipment, etc.)
Material information – (lot ID, material properties, storage locations, etc.)
Personnel – (who is performing tasks, signoffs, etc.)
Energy – (transport, heat/cool, mix, etc.)
Equipment – (raw material source, equipment utilization, portable equipment information.)

– as well as other aspects that can be used to make informed decisions. (more…)

Batch Forensics by ECS Solutions

The term forensics refers to the application of scientific knowledge to problems, especially scientific analysis, and data analysis of physical evidence. In a plant environment, data and scientific analysis can be the key to discovering opportunities to improve the automation solution that exists, forensic tools can be implemented in all phases of the life cycle of a system, but ideally, they should be considered during the design phase.

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