Configurable MES Solution Rapidly Delivers OEE Improvement For Cable Manufacturer
Project Summary:
In order to gain more insight into how to optimize line performance, Belden decided to partner with Flexware and utilize their SparkMES™ to rapidly capture and visualize key OEE metrics. This project returned significant ROI for Belden.
Problem:
While Belden maintained high standards, some of their outdated devices were beginning to hinder their overall productivity. As demand for products was on the rise, these hindrances were becoming more of an immediate problem. With little automated data gathering, these solutions were highly manual. Belden needed a system that could automate data collection and help pinpoint the biggest pain points of their many processes to expedite solutions.
Solution:
In order to solve this problem, Belden chose Ignition due to its exceptional performance and cost-effective nature. Additionally, Ignition’s wide array of device drivers would be invaluable for connecting Belden’s many legacy devices, eliminating the need to replace aging equipment and resulting in significant cost savings. Other features, such as real-time alarming, historical reporting, and the sleek and easy-to-access visuals of Perspective would also be important to deliver the perfect enterprise solution.
Belden decided to utilize Flexware Innovation’s SparkMES™ OEE Package, which is built on Ignition. Flexware’s OEE package provides many useful Perspective dashboards and configuration screens, database tables, scripts, and more to accelerate development and deployment. Everything is easily configurable, from the OEE formulas to data propagation to downtime events.
All of this together helped to overcome the biggest challenge of this project: the wide array of high-speed devices that all represent data in different ways. From OPC UA to JDBC to Modbus, few platforms could cover the breadth of communications methods required to provide seamless connectivity. However, Ignition’s library of built-in device drivers and the configurability of the SparkMES™ data collection made this whole problem much simpler than it would have been with any other platform.
The other challenge was that this system needed the ability to expand to more sites and an even wider array of devices. The combination of Ignition’s intuitive device and tag configuration with the easy-to-use SparkMES™ configuration screens allowed the Belden team to greatly expand the system.
The project team was made up of several members of the Belden team partnered with two of Flexware’s MES-focused Ignition developers. While the Flexware team worked to install SparkMES™ and make any process-based customizations, the Belden team worked to help with device connectivity and tag discovery, and eventually to create some of their own powerful reports based on the data gathered.
Results:
The results of this project were better than originally expected. Data is now easily visible to every single Belden employee from the shop floor to the top floor. Utilizing a combination of Ignition’s powerful reporting and Tableau, the data is not only accessible, but actionable.
This culminated in the original plant exceeding their original goal of a 5% OEE improvement with a total improvement of 18%, over 3.5x the original goal. This performance improvement equated to $500,000 in annual cost savings. This increase didn’t go unnoticed. Other facilities in the enterprise noticed the improvement and have been wanting to adopt the system themselves. And utilizing the ease of deployment and configurability provided by Ignition and SparkMES™, the Belden team was able to expand this application to three more sites with occasional technical support from Flexware and have plans to deploy at 20+ more sites across the globe.
Looking even further into the future, Belden has started to pair the process data gathered by this project with Machine Learning to start performing predictive maintenance on equipment to get ahead of potential issues.
Belden used this project to turn their oldest plant into a showcase, inviting customers, prospects, and partners to see this world-class facility. The facility features real-time digital displays throughout the plant, providing insights to both executive leadership and line workers. With this infrastructure in place, Belden can now bring on new examples of Digital Transformation for years to come.
Start Date: July 2023
Deploy Date: November 2023
Project Scope:
Tags: 2,179
Screens: 7
Clients: 15
Alarms: 117
Devices used: 11 Logix, 3 SLC, 1 ControlLogix, 1 CompactLogix, 2 PLC5, 265 Monnit Devices
Architectures used: Standard
Databases used: 3 MSSQL
Historical data logged: 818 tags, 90,286 rows per day
3 окт 2024
