Glass Manufacturer Leverages Hybrid Architecture To Deploy Identical Applications At Multiple Sites

Project Summary:

Saint-Gobain Glass mobilized 2Gi Technologie and Plantformance to create and deploy Ignition applications in several countries, within a hybrid architecture of local real-time data and shared data in the cloud.

These applications enable Saint-Gobain Glass to have identical applications in its plants to accelerate digitalization and to consolidate data at a global level, as well as leverage data locally for immediate remediation plans stored in Microsoft planner.

Problem:

Saint-Gobain Glass is a global manufacturing company with factories across many countries. For that reason, Saint-Gobain Glass faced some critical problems:

• Inconsistent digitalization across plants due to varied technological capabilities and lack of standardized processes.
• Fragmented data and siloed data storage that inhibited efficient decision-making and global data analysis.
• Slow decision-making processes due to reliance on manual data, lack of real-time data accessibility, and a mix of global and local data.
• Lack of comprehensive visibility into global operations due to decentralized data management and reporting structures.

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Solution:

The first step for Saint-Gobain Glass was to gather high-level expertise on Ignition, both on software development, IT operations, and at the frontier of the two: deployment at a large scale.

Plantformance and 2Gi Technologie designed a target architecture involving different layers, and integrated the idea of a one-hour deployment for a factory. The IT teams of Saint-Gobain Glass defined the global data layers and global tools.

In this architecture, many components are key:

• The Enterprise Administration Module (EAM) for its capability to deploy the same project everywhere.
• The middleware layer: Saint-Gobain goes through this layer to retrieve data from the global tools (even those in the cloud), so they can control the security of performance and production data.
• The project inheritance: to make sure that common functions are reused by all applications.
• The global data referential.
• The software architecture: a project has to be developed according to rules defined by 2Gi Technologie in order to fit to the deployment process. For instance, the way to manage the items shared at the Gateway level (resources, images, translations, etc.) is designed to avoid overlaps and confusion inside the code.
• The versioning strategy for all components, including the master project and scripts.

To manage the deployments, Saint-Gobain Glass, Plantformance, and 2Gi Technologie shared a detailed process that defines the method to industrialize the deployment, identify the local configurations and make sure that they are included in the global referential, and include local tests to ensure the quality delivered.

Last but not least, Saint-Gobain Glass has included change management in deployment phases to ensure the deployed products are correctly understood and used, and to collect concrete and high value feedback from the field to improve the products for the benefit of all factories.

Result:

Rapid deployment capability: a project can now be deployed in two or three factories worldwide within an hour. More than 10 countries now benefit from these applications. The projects are identical in each factory and they can all benefit from new features.

Plantformance globally manages cybersecurity as well as IT operations, consolidating control to a single entity with a clear role.

Data is collected and organized the same way. This makes local and global analysis and decision-making possible.

Greatly consolidated HMI using different sources and services, such as a connection to Microsoft planner to define tasks.

Visual Management, with local real-time sources, global data from a data lake, enabling decision-making and task creation directly in Microsoft Planner.

Energy Management System:

• Local configurator to connect and manage electricity meters.
• Local live visualization for local and immediate remediation on consumption.
• Streaming to a central data lake for global KPIs and comparisons.

It took only 16 months to create and successfully deploy Inductive Automation's Ignition applications in over 10 plants in France and abroad.

Start Date: November 2023

Deploy Date: March 2024

Project Scope:

Tags: 10k+ / factory

Screens: Dynamic dashboards generated by each user

Clients: 10+ / factory

Alarms: 500-1k / factory

Devices used: PCs and tablets

Architectures used: Enterprise (with EAM), Plantformance Factory Brains, connections to cloud services via middleware (Apache Nifi)

Databases used: MySQL + PostgreSQL

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