Digital Troubleshooting Guide Boosts Chemical Company's Efficiency

Project Summary:

Cooley Group has a corporate Manufacturing 4.0/Digital Transformation initiative that it is implementing using the Ignition platform. RoviSys was brought on to help guide Cooley Group on this journey and develop the functionalities it needed in a templatized way that promotes scalability and supportability. Cooley Group requested the use of Ignition to develop a Digital Troubleshooting Guide that operators could use to help resolve downtime events impacting their OEE. For this project, RoviSys implemented a creative solution that gave Cooley Group exactly what it asked for, yet made it easy for it to build and configure on its own within the Ignition designer.

Problem:

When a downtime event occurred on a production line, there was no formal system in place to help operators troubleshoot the issue and perform a root-cause analysis. If the operator didn’t know how to solve the problem, they would have to reach out to their supervisor and wait for them to be available to get the system back up and running. If the supervisor didn’t know how to solve the problem, they would have to reach out to the engineering team for help, and so on. Often, these issues had common fixes, but the tribal knowledge of how to fix the issues lay with certain individuals. When these individuals left the company or retired, that knowledge went with them, creating a major problem for the company. Cooley Group needed a way to digitally capture and retain this knowledge so that it wasn’t lost, and needed a way for everybody to easily access this information.

Solution:

Knowing that Cooley Group needed a configuration-based implementation that would allow it to create Troubleshooting Guides on its own, RoviSys approached this project aiming to create a solution that was dynamic, flexible, and required no custom programming in Ignition. RoviSys started the project by first asking Cooley Group to provide some examples of what it wanted a troubleshooting guide to look like. Using these examples (which were flow diagrams), RoviSys developed a mechanism to build out the troubleshooting guides by creating folders in the designer. Using a directory-based design, each folder represented a troubleshooting option. The folders could be nested within other folders to build out the entire troubleshooting flow. In each folder, the user could add supplementary troubleshooting information (PDFs, images, documents, etc.) that could be accessed by clicking on an icon from the troubleshooting screen.

Results:

The biggest benefit from this project is that the solution was so generic and flexible that it could be used for a multitude of different applications. The simplistic/configuration-based solution made it easy to train the customer, which meant it was also easy for the customer to train its own staff. The reusability of this solution will allow RoviSys to easily reimplement it for other customers in the future.

Deploy Date: March 2023

Project Scope:

Tags: 3,348

Screens: 110

Clients: Average 20 clients at a time

Alarms: 8 pipelines, 133 alarms

Devices used: 21 (Modbus TCP, MicroLogix, ControlLogix, S7s, LogixDriver)

Architectures used: 3 Redundant Standard Architectures connected via gateway network

Databases used: 4, MSSQL ~200 queries/sec

Historical data logged: Transaction groups log environmental and process data on 6/10/60s increments, tags are also historized at same rate