Improvements Beyond Expectations for Global Leader in Beauty & Wellness

Project Scope:

• Tags: 63,000
• Screens: 50
• Clients: 10
• Alarms: 8,263
• Devices used: 1, AB PLC
• Architectures used: Standard
• Databases used: 3, SQL
• Historical data logged: 500

Project Summary:

This project was developed for a greenfield site, built for the manufacturing of beauty and wellness products. The customer had outgrown their original site and had to expand their production to meet demand. The new site had to provide a solution with improved visibility on their systems, services, and manufacturing processes, and provide consistency in the quality of their manufacturing procedures.

Problem:

BWX had outgrown the capacity of their original site and could no longer meet market demands. Additionally, they were facing challenges to maintain consistency across their production.

Operators had minimal visibility of their services. Any process inhibits from their upstream supply would not be detected for some time, causing delays in production and inconsistency in the batching process. Upstream supply would include cold water, hot water, chilled water, and compressed air.

Operators had complete flexibility on the batching process. Quality control was therefore challenging because operators did not have a strict procedure to follow to produce a batch. The method used to produce a batch was paper-based and there was no way of ensuring that the correct procedure, as developed by the product development team, would be followed accurately.

Solution:

Process visibility, alarming, and trending has greatly improved by using the Perspective Module to develop diagnostic and operation views. The operator views were developed using ISA101 principles applied to Automation Mechatronics’ existing library of graphics. The piping tool for Perspective was released during the development phase, which facilitated the creation of P&ID or layout views. This is a vast improvement, making the Perspective Module a truly process-oriented SCADA system.

Ignition scripting was a powerful tool to interface with a SQL database to develop the required platform for a recipe system, customized for the needs of the client. While the database schema used Automation Mechatronics’ standard architecture, the properties and procedures were adapted to the needs of the recipes and methods to follow for each of the 200 recipes used by the site.

Perspective was the only end-user module used in this project, which provides powerful flexibility to display the project views on a web browser. Every component of the project, including layouts, recipe design, trending, user management, status, and dashboards, could be displayed on selected touch screens, status TVs, or user laptops in the office. The Perspective Workstation application was used on the operator touch screens for day-to-day operation.

Results:

Within two weeks of services being connected, two production lines were running beyond their expected OEE. With Ignition, the product research team was able to prepare the product recipes and database before the production equipment was fully commissioned from their laptops in the office, and operators had full access to the method to follow from their operator screens. This eliminated the need for printing batch records from their ERP system.

With full view of upstream processes, maintenance can now attend to any downtime immediately, and maintain a high availability of these services throughout production.

Batches are consistent across multiple shifts, irrespective of which operator is assigned to prepare individual batches. Sampling and product release has been interlocked as part of the batching process, eliminating the risk of batches being released without quality control.

The SCADA has been developed with the plan to include batch reports and cleaning reports in the next phase of the development. This means the batching area will be able to operate paperless. Furthermore, auditing will be transparent, as reporting will be consistent and standardized.

Improved visibility and layout views developed with the new piping tools have facilitated the plant optimization process. Water and energy savings have already seen significant improvement since the initial plant start-up. Empowering the personnel on site to access relevant engineering parameters means the continuous improvement process can be carried out on a day-to-day basis.