Software Puts Your Plant on Fast-Forward
Technology will continue to play a greater role throughout the meat and poultry category's supply chain. The requirement to track data across all operations will only increase as companies seek to drive operational costs down. This is as evident in the systems that control and machinery and manage production processes as it is in those that provide track and trace for a recall.
Consider this Jan. 9 announcement by Agrculture Secretary Tom Vilsack: "Our workload is at record highs, we have less money and fewer people and work to do, and we tried to address how do you do that without interrupting service." That statement, along with the announcement that USDA will close 259 offices, labs and other facilities, places a heavier burden on inspectors. It also places a heavier burden, but also an opportunity, on plants.
"When an inspector goes through the plant's logs to see they've been monitoring everything properly, if there are gaps in the reports, the inspector is less likely to find issues that warrant a closer look," says Michael Blanchette, regional sales manager for NuTEC (www.nutecmfg.com, New Lenox, Ill.). That's why, beyond selling patty formers and meat depositors to processors, NuTEC and other suppliers to the meat industry advise customers not just about the obvious business priorities -- accurate weights and high throughput -- but also on issues such as "making sure the sanitizing chemicals will meet their requirements for, say, clean-in-place without damaging their machines."
The information trail begins at the grinders, formers, weigh scales, inspection systems and other machines, where quality personnel pull and record data on samples. The data also can be used to monitor and control equipment and integrate pieces into larger production systems. Turnkey equipment vendors who manufacture, sell and in cases take responsibility for full line installations have increasingly offered such automation systems.
A single plant database for process engineering, control and plant information/execution systems speeds implementation and boosts usability.
Food Processing has covered such systems in the past, including the Information That Matters automation offering from Heat and Control, (www.heatandcontrol.com), Hayward, Calif. The system can pull together line data at the manufacturing execution system (MES) level for incorporation into plant initiatives such as key performance indicators (KPIs) and scorecard-type displays of overall equipment effectiveness to be used by plant machine interfaces, office desktop or even mobile applications. Symbolic of many of these software systems, Information That Matters has evolved in just one year.
Object-based automation
A year after launching the system, Heat and Control has upgraded it with a new version, ITM Plant iT, which joins the MES layer together with the real-time control and engineering layers in a single, integrated environment. The solution is based on industry standards, such as ISA 88 and ISA 95. Using a standard SQL database plant server for a turnkey solution, it can feed data across operations, such as production case counts by order; moving averages of checkweights; lot tracking from materials/ingredients to finished packages; and maintenance data down to real-time control and information management of error codes.
Engineers versed in the most current offerings of control industry systems will appreciate that the system is just as up-to-date. A true, object-oriented engineering environment eliminates custom control coding and in many cases all control coding in favor of click-and-drag graphical objects, with only parameters needing to be entered. Heat and Control provides a library of objects for all machines, with programming embedded inside. These are "dragged" together to create automation systems for a turnkey line automation system. The user or any machine vendor can contribute machine objects in a multi-vendor plant.
"Our objects contain the control logic, real-time control visualization at the human-machine interface layer and all the MES data, all in the same object," says Chris Farver, global director for controls and information at Heat and Control.
This level of integration allows processors to "jump the gap" between disparate systems to significantly reduce the time and effort of automating a line, adds Paul Nowicki, global information engineer for Heat and Control.
Object-based software has advanced far beyond the graphs, even scrubbing through historical data to “re-run” processes for quality improvements.
Via a secure Internet connection, Nowicki and Farver took this writer for a remote tour of a live system running at a customer's plant in Detroit. In the process, four conveyor lines were auger-feeding seasoning to be mixed in a tumble-drum with a snack product, then packaged with a multi-head computerized combination weigher and bagmaker.
At the control level, animated graphic displays of the machinery and parameters of concern to operators were shown. Also like a current-generation control offering, clicking on the tumble-drum showed data on product flow and asset status at the time of the demo; control programming was also viewable in runtime. One especially useful aspect of the system is its ability to essentially re-run historic process control and MES data for troubleshooting and continuous improvement.
"If the customer has a problem, such as if a line or asset is down, I can see what was going on at the time," says Nowicki, pointing to a recent process upset. "Let's see what was happening at 2 p.m. on the 17th of the month … now we're viewing and navigating the process exactly as it was going on," he said. And with that, he ran the process as if in real-time using an historical database -- this plant happens to store two years' worth of data on its plant server -- and viewed a "rerun" of the process as if it were running at the moment of the demo.
This capability came in handy when the tumble-drum was cycling on and off repeatedly in one incident, and the plant manager didn't know why. "Our engineer in Dallas pulled up the process user interface screen," says Nowicki, "and by making a correction to one parameter, fixed it remotely. No one had to wait, no one had to get on a plane, and our customer's plant didn't go down."
"It's like being able to TiVo your plant," says Farver, referring to the popular set-top digital TV video recorder. He added that beyond defensive troubleshooting applications, such historical backtracking can be used to identify shifts where the plant was at peak performance, record the exact settings and set new benchmarks.
"We are reorganizing plant automation infrastructure to make information truly ready to be sent up to ERP systems," Nowicki explains. A fully integrated object-based environment eliminates the walls "between one system and another before the data needs to ultimately feed-into SAP," he adds.
SAP (www.sap.com) is one of numerous enterprise resource planning and related business software systems. But as the preeminent such system, speeding the flow of data between plant floor personnel and systems represents perhaps the greatest challenge facing companies struggling to establish IT standards and at the same time empower its workforce.
Johnsonville ERP speeds plant chores
Johnsonville Sausage, Sheboygan Falls, Wis., for decades has fostered a culture of employee empowerment and change management. Also for years, the company has supported that culture with information technology upgrades.
Since 2005, the company has been implementing SAP as its corporate information technology backbone. Implementation of human resources and payroll over the past decade was followed by installation of modules for production, maintenance and other functions across the operation.
A corporate standard can improve data visibility for top management, but integrating data from all manner of existing systems often requires the IT department to program using SAP Advanced Business Application Programming routines, such as Legacy System Migration WorkBench scripts. But Johnsonville found a tool to speed that process using software products from Winshuttle (www.winshuttle.com) Bothell, Wash.
The software is designed as an SAP add-on that takes data from SAP and loads it into a software environment that's easier to work with, such as standard and familiar Microsoft applications. Johnsonville uses Excel, whose standard spreadsheets serve as a staging area for work – and which is more familiar to most personnel than SAP's own forms.
Scripting efforts require no programming. Dynamic transactions are added without coding for various practical uses. Production data from real-time automation systems can automatically populate fields, or values can be automatically loaded into the fields of a technician's preventive maintenance work order, based on the frequency of the PM, the schedule and duration of work and so on. After whatever use that Excel spreadsheet is put to, the information is sent back to SAP.
"We are a lean company and constantly need to find ways to do more with less," says Jason King, master data business analyst. He says the SAP add-on software "can provide us with efficiencies in many different areas by making SAP easier to navigate and just running transactions in SAP much faster than humanly possible. This can give us back some time in our day to get more done, or just keep up with the ever increasing demands on our time at work.”
Johnsonville has used the software for collecting and/or entering data into SAP, such as material and vendor master data, and to simplify, for example, master data creation and maintenance forms. In one example, King says: "We were able to load all our master data and various other pieces of data from the plant maintenance module of our legacy system. This cut hundreds of hours from our data entry time."
In the area of maintenance, using an Excel form can simplify the search for parts in complicated equipment bills of material, and helps quickly bring together more and better data on equipment downtime, failure modes, historical maintenance records and data on mean time between failure and mean time between repair.
"It gives us the ability to look at all that data together, so when we're doing reliability analyses, we're not basing our assessments on tribal knowledge but on an accurate view of past history," says Dana Presley, global maintenance coordinator. With a command of historic data, he says, the company can "do a better job on a regular basis [and] make improvements over the long term."
It's now easy to call up a list of the highest downtime incidents and do a five-year analysis and projections. "And if we have 100 failures, we can identify and act more rapidly on, for instance, a particular kind of bearing that may have been behind a preponderance of the failures," says Presley.
At Johnsonville, the Winshuttle software is used within the IT department to lessen the load on operations. But King says users "from all over the organization have benefited from the automated loading of data that it provides," including "preventing manual data entry errors, which can directly affect food safety and quality." He adds that as Johnsonville continues implementing SAP, the add-on app will continue helping the company take pieces of it "from the vision stage -- a process map on a white board -- to getting it implemented in the plant much more quickly."
