What happens when your machines start talking to you?

Its ten O’clock in the evening and your cell phone rings, its your dry process area Kiln 21 Variable speed drive XJ721, he says his temperature has just crossed the high alarm limit point. As soon as you hang up, your compressor WB21 calls, his maintenance is due in 15 days, just checking up to tell your that he’s told the asset manager to arrange for his spares.

Your production manager’s life is no different, his plant floor keeps telling him when orders are completed, his machines tell him about their over all equipment efficiency, and their down time KPIs. Even the sales guys know production again which purchase orders has been completed. Their forecasting is now more accurate then ever before.

The above scenario is possible because of a unified plant-wide data repository that communicates with enterprise applications seamlessly.

The ICI Polyester plant management have their machines talk to them on a real time basis. Their work in process inventory is at its lowest ever, and their production is at its highest ever. Only 20% of all plants in the world enjoy these efficiencies, the reason why production intelligence is limited is because of the complexity in its implementation. Also the return on investment can only come if the management is successfully able to make use of all the information that becomes available to it.

The exact same problem was faced at ICI Polyester Fibers, a Premier Synthetic Fiber plant in Pakistan. The plant was commissioned in 1982. With numerous expansions, the plant today has a capacity of over 350 Tonnes per day. Faced with stiffer market competition, ICI Polyester even employed SAP to have better information flow. Whereas SAP solved many of their managerial problems, organizational islands still remained. To cope with that, ICI needed to bridge their plant floor with the rest of the organization. However, this was not an easy task, considering the fact that ICI Polyester housed around 30 automation solutions of various vendors over its 25 years history.

They needed a product that could work as a global data integrator and interpreter at the same time. Their choice of IntelliMAX was for these reasons, and for the applications support that their integration vendor would get from the SENSYS solutions (http://www.sensys.com/) team.
To bridge so many automation islands, a unified layer was needed to be developed which would gather information from all the islands, bridge them together and make the information flow transparent. That layer was OPC. ICI Polyester Fibers contact Applications & Solutions team of Sensys Inc. for the design and development of this MES layer.

The project was broken down into phases. The first part of the project was to develop a central repository accessible to all the relevant functions. When this central repository has been linked to all the Automation islands, it will then be linked to the SAP, thereby, feeding the accurate and real time data to all the relevant personnel within the organization.

IntelliMAX, being grounds up OPC compliance, was the obvious choice for this task. For the initial phase, key critical areas where identified. OPC drivers for the different vendors brought in seamless connectivity to IntelliMAX.

SENSYS solutions team worked closely with the ICI engineering team and their automation contractors in understanding the current operations, and identifying how best to extract information out of them to de-bottleneck production processes.
Following a the need analysis and implementation phases. Thanks to IntelliMAX, Rizwan Afzal, Engineering Manager at polyester fibres, even gets a new year greeting SMS from some of his motors.