“Data remains just data if it is not analyzed and attempts are not made to improve production performance with its help,” – phrase suits all current situations for production plants.
Since 2013, INFOCOM LTD has completed a full range of works on automation and distribution of energy for all production buildings of a corn processing plant in the Zhytomyr region, including projects to increase the plant’s capacity. In parallel with the increase in capacity, the customer’s IT service, in search of a powerful tool for analytics, settled on the MindSphere solution for collecting, aggregating and analyzing data.
On April 2022, INFOCOM LTD specialists completed a project to integrate the data of the developed automated control system and MindSphere – an industrial Internet of Things solution within the IoT as a Service model, which is offered on the market by the world-famous Siemens company.
At this stage, the goal of the systems integration project is to obtain complete data on the state of equipment in production (operation, planned and unplanned downtime) for subsequent calculations of OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness – overall equipment efficiency), and, accordingly, to display key indicators of operational efficiency in real time
Before implementation, engineers prepared a tree of “stops” – in simple words – the reasons for production stops – with more than 200 possible reasons applicable to various types of equipment, sensors, meters, alarms. The plant contol system is configured in such a way as to automatically transmit statuses about equipment operation. Both systems (control system and MindSphere) are configured for regular data exchange for updating values when a context value is changed. The collection of such data will allow:
- Get data on uptime and stops, as well as unplanned downtime
- Record short work stoppages and their reason codes
- Schedule preventive maintenance depending on the equipment loading plan
Such analytics of data on the efficiency of lines and equipment using monitoring will allow you to identify weak links in the lines and increase their reliability. Automatic data collection will free operators from the need for manual data entry and replace manual post-facto documentation with dashboards and real-time analytics.
The collection of production data in the MindSphere cloud will allow the Customer, among other things, to make comparisons between several enterprises of the group.
Demonstration of integration of control system (PCS) to MindSphere to OEE calculation: