Data Integration
Digital Integration is a big challenge for any SME and its especially hard to achieve when your facility has been in production for over 25 years and has a complex mix of legacy and modern manufacturing equipment. Getting your digital strategy right for the organisation and its workforce takes time and patience, but its vital in order to hold your place in the market.
Overview: Engineering leaders at COMPANY B are no strangers to digitisation and have experience of using advanced production systems. The plant has grown organically over its 25 years of production; many day-to-day processes are using legacy equipment and reporting operations are still manual, gathering data from different systems to create a single weekly report. The COMPANY B team were keen to set out a blueprint for Data Integration that could be rolled out plant wide one line at a time, to minimise disruption and keep production targets met during the changeover. The end goal is to have a fully digitally integrated shopfloor and up to the minute production data from all equipment available in a single centralised dashboard, to be used by operators and management to manage production planning and report on hourly/daily/monthly progress, leading into a full plant monitoring system.
Approach: The Industreweb Data Platform (Sentinel Edge Device) was installed on the shop floor to capture machine data, directly from the PLCs (Mitsubishi, Omron) where available and from overlaid sensors and external I/O (Moxa) placed on the labelling and capping stations to provide counts, rejects and stoppages. Data is pushed via MQTT to an internal broker and stored in an SQL database and consumed in the dashboard to provide vital production data including OEE, Planned vs Actual, Hourly/Daily counts and Outputs vs losses.
Machine Protocols: Ethernet IP, DeviceNet.
Technologies used: Moxa, Industreweb Data Platform, Industreweb Display.