Metals

Benefits of Tuning PID Loops

Control loops are a critical part of manufacturing and other process control systems. Whether controlling critical temperatures, flows, pressures, or nearly countless other potential elements, a system which keeps the behavior and relationship between setpoints and variables predictable and optimized will add value in many ways. Process control loops and systems may produce minimally acceptable results whether they’re properly tuned or not, but the long-term impact of optimization will pay dividends which far exceed the costs of the tuning effort.

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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.)

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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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Securing your Intellectual Property

Production procedures and formula values property

How secure is the intellectual property of your products?

Many degrees of automation exist in manufacturing plants, but they all have a common requirement– specifying the activities and the order in which they need to occur as well as the key setpoints such as materials, amounts, tolerances, temperatures, durations, etc.

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The Importance of Material Tracing

Traceability on a processing or production line is incredibly important, especially when it comes to food products, where having the ability to track every ingredient down to the source is crucial to the health and safety of the consumers.

As parts of the country begin to move out of COVID-19 shutdowns, we have been hearing about “contact tracing” as a tool for containing a secondary spread of the disease. Material, lot tracing, or traceability has been part of producing safe food products for a long time. The concepts behind contact tracing and material tracing are similar.

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Automated Procedures for Manual Processes

Process customers do not need to automate their equipment to start taking advantage of some of the important benefits that off-the-shelf automation products possess. Processes that are typically operated manually can benefit from automating their procedural execution, meaning that the activities that operator typically perform by following printed Standard Operating Procedures can be Specified, Enforced, and Verified in electronic form.

Off-the-shelf products allow us to Specify recipes that can span multiple unit procedures. These can be enforced by prompting the operator or operators of the different areas to perform the required manual activities in the order specified, information normally captured on a sheet of paper or batch log can be annotated and journaled electronically and then this information can be instantly used to make decisions on the active recipe (i.e. adjust the amount of material to be added based on a sample analysis).

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News

Benefits of Tuning PID Loops

Large Scale SCADA Migration using Ignition coupled with the Perspective Module

Manual Ingredient Additions – Confirmation and Tracking

Embedded Engineers as Trusted Advisors

Benefits of a Campaign Manager

Batch Forensics: Additional Report Parameters Enhance Process Performance

Batch Forensics by ECS Solutions

Securing your Intellectual Property

The Importance of Material Tracing

Automated Procedures for Manual Processes