Plant floor's integrative shift

To Fred Ampolini, the benefit of a single industrial automation supplier is turning to just one group for both systems and project execution. "Rockwell offers sophisticated solutions that meet our requirements, [and its] personnel have extensive knowledge of their offerings," says Ampolini, director of factory electrical engineering at Brown & Williamson Tobacco, a Macon, Ga.-based cigarette manufacturer. "We rely on them to come in and learn about our plans, then determine the best way to proceed."

Brown & Williamson and other companies are quick to seize on one element of the industrial automation market's evolution: consulting and services businesses.

This calls attention to a larger market shift. Recognizing that manufacturers need to use production data throughout the enterprise, vendors well known for their human-machine interfaces (HMI) and supervisory control systems have extended their product lines to include application suites aimed at integrating with enterprise solutions. Offering consulting services as well—e.g., production control, monitoring, and management; and data archiving and analysis—means vendors can sell comprehensive operations improvement, rather than just black boxes.

For manufacturers, the aptly described "one-throat-to-choke" approach enables them to deal with a single company for consulting and solutions.

"At a fundamental level, all manufacturers have similar goals: reduce costs, get product out faster, and decrease the number of vendors they work with," says Rich Ryan, president, Rockwell Software. "Manufacturers value our commitment to [understanding their] business problems, and sorting through all possible manufacturing strategies. We look at what data is important and what business drivers make that data important, then consider vertical solutions, architecture, and infrastructure."

That approach is ensuring success at Brown & Williamson, which uses Allen-Bradley AC drives, Rockwell PLCs, and Rockwell Software soft PLCs and RSView32 HMI and RSView32 supervisor edition systems to monitor and control automation machines and processes.

"Over the years we've built a good relationship with Rockwell," Ampolini emphasizes. Specifically, when Brown & Williamson initiated a virtual private network (VPN) with Web-based thin clients so authorized users could remotely access the company network and plant-floor systems, it asked people from Rockwell to visit at least a half-dozen times to determine what was needed and how it could be achieved, Ampolini says.

"We used to staff our facility 24/7, but with the VPN, the thin clients, [and the remote access], we've reduced the number of people required to work on capital projects and keep the plant up," Ampolini says. "Rockwell played a big role, and saved us a lot of hours on the project."

Many suppliers now offer what ARC Advisory Group calls an operations management platform, says Greg Gorbach, a service director with the Dedham, Mass-based firm. Such platforms comprise a framework for deploying and connecting applications, as well as other information sources throughout the plant.

"It makes a lot of sense for manufacturers to address the whole of their manufacturing operations in a unified way, and not perpetuate today's inefficient, stand-alone application approach," maintains Gorbach.

For example, GE Fanuc Automation has been investing heavily in R&D and acquiring companies such as Intellution and Mountain Systems to offer additional applications in a cohesive manner, says Kevin Roach, a VP with GE Fanuc Automation. The resulting portfolio of production management applications—known as Proficy, and introduced last month—enables the real-time enterprise, he says.

"Proficy includes controls, HMI and supervisory control systems, historians and analytics, plant management and execution, and a real-time information portal," Roach says. "We realize manufacturers use various systems on the plant floor, so Proficy was built to be open and layered [to enable using] parts of it with systems from other vendors."

ABB developed Industrial IT apps—e.g., manufacturing execution systems, or MES—to bridge the gap between its process control systems and manufacturers' ERP systems. And more recently, the company began helping its customers make better use of assets, says Bob Hausler, a VP for Industrial IT with ABB.

"Customers tell us they face lean initiatives or corporate edicts to cut costs, and want to know how they can leverage assets," Hausler says. "They have PLCs and control systems, but don't know how to access data from the plant floor to know, for instance, when a machine is down and how that downtime will impact current orders and the scheduling process."

Hausler says the difference is that in the past, a distributed control system or HMI for a control system would simply notify an operator that a machine was down. Through an alliance with MRO Software, ABB integrated its 800xA solution with MRO's Maximo enterprise asset management system to move that notification up several levels.

"Today, if a production operator sees an alarm, [he] can open a Maximo maintenance work order, and the automated workflow then coordinates between the control system and the maintenance system to schedule preventive maintenance," Hausler says. "It doesn't require users walking over to maintenance or using multiple systems. Plus, when the work is done, data regarding how the machine is calibrated is sent back to the production system to provide an electronic audit trail."

Capturing process knowledge gives management the right information to increase return-on-assets, according to Lane Desborough, director of strategy at Honeywell Process Solutions.

"Companies need to know more about what they're doing, but data about production status isn't enough—the real value comes from placing data in context," Desborough says. "The key to making better decisions faster is to look at data and understand its implications."

One way of doing that is to look at trends. There is huge demand for solutions that can aggregate data about production and then apply analytics to improve decision-making and support overall performance improvement, says ARC's Gorbach. It's driven, he adds, by a real need among manufacturers to find ways to become more competitive, cost-effective, and responsive.

"It's also driven by awareness that new technology and applications can enable significant transformation in the way plants are run," says Gorbach. "The keys are to collect operational data, establish manufacturing context for that data, and serve it to people or systems where it may inform and improve business processes."

Use of plant historians is one way of doing that. Used widely in process industries that must manage huge numbers of control variables, they now are being deployed in other industries, says Elliot Middleton, a manager for plant intelligence systems with Wonderware. Consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals manufacturers, for example, must deal with a high degree of variability—whether it's the actual products, or the packaging, he says.

"Historians are necessary in many industries to prevent flying blind," Middleton says. "As computing power increases and prices come down, we've seen historian sales increase—and expect continued growth."

At Elk, a manufacturer of roofing shingles, Wonderware's InTouch HMI, IndustrialSQL Server, and ActiveFactory applications are critical to running the Shafter, Calif.-based plant 24/7. The IndustrialSQL Server historian and associated data analysis tools enable immediate access to real-time plant information that can lead to actionable plant intelligence, says Paul Rogers, systems engineer at Elk.

"With IndustrialSQL Server software, we collect data from 6,500 points every two seconds, and keep more than two years of data," Rogers says. "It's our eyes on the plant floor because we can't watch everything all the time."

The historian is useful for process control, quality assurance, and even inventory management applications, says Rogers. However, some applications have greater bottom-line impact than others.

"We take the plant down for four hours about every six weeks for maintenance—other than that, we run 24/7," he says. "Time is money: it costs $6,000 per hour when the line is down, so we must have insight [to required maintenance] and when preventive maintenance should be performed."

Using IndustrialSQL and ActiveFactory also gives Rogers and others a view to performance trends. "We can see that a gearbox is slipping and needs maintenance," he says. "It tells us what's going to happen so we can fix it when we want, instead of waiting for a breakdown that takes a whole line down."