X

BLOM Maritime, a global organization offering 3D laser scanning, metrology, and engineering services, faced several challenges. The company had to deal with large amounts of data that demanded accuracy. They also needed fast and detailed digital visualizations of physical assets. The company aimed to increase collaboration, incorporate parameterized design, integrate engineering and design, improve efficiency, and reduce design time. However, the vast amount of laser-scanned data posed a challenge on how to exploit it to provide an accurate and trustworthy digital asset of the physical asset scanned, which can then be used as an engineering design platform.

Airbus Helicopters, a leading manufacturer of military, commercial, emergency service and private helicopters, was facing challenges in operating its product testing benches. The company needed a robust software platform and process applications to accurately and efficiently operate its product testing benches. The existing system needed to be replaced with a single, easy-to-use solution for supervising test beds and logistics. The new system needed to be open and extensible, capable of interfacing seamlessly with additional testing installations. The deployment of the new solution had to be done without jeopardizing the functionality of the overall testing centre.

Italpresse Gauss, a company that builds machines and automatic work cells for light alloy casting primarily for the global automotive industry, was looking to develop a custom HMI that operates with other OEM devices and software platforms. They also wanted to incorporate AR/VR technologies as an asset performance and remote support tool to support the company’s leadership position in Industrie 4.0. The challenges they faced included introducing Industrie 4.0 technologies to a traditional aluminum foundry industry, leveraging breakthrough AR/VR technology to pilot new asset performance management and operator training solutions, and delivering new concepts to market on an aggressive timeline.

Plascon, a successful paint and coatings company, was facing challenges in maintaining batch consistency and uniformity in their manufacturing process. The company had initially implemented Wonderware InBatch software in 1995, but as they expanded their product line, they realized the need for an upgrade. The existing technology infrastructure could not keep up with Plascon’s expanding business operations, leading to poor production efficiency, lack of detailed traceability, and a multitude of errors inherent in manual processes. Production scheduling became more difficult, and automated batch reports detailing the productivity process could no longer be produced for plant management. The new software infrastructure had to address key operational issues such as clearly defined batch recipes, detailed displays of batch status, and a reliable, semi-automatic mode of batching.

ST Powder Coatings, a producer of high-end, intricately customized thermosetting powder coatings, needed a software solution that could integrate information between the plant and business systems, and enable them to keep production efficiency and product quality consistently high. The company had a requirement to get the plant up and running as quickly as possible. They needed a very short development time to start shipping product within 4 months. The integration of information between the business system and the plant was key to ST Powder Coatings' ability to accurately fill its customers unique and variant orders. The software also needed to assist ST Powder Coatings quickly identify the source of product variations when a color does not turn out precisely how the customer expected.

PVC Compounders LLC, a manufacturer of PVC compounds in pellet form, faced several challenges in their operations. The company operates on a built-to-order model, keeping minimal inventory at their plant. This necessitated daily deliveries of raw materials and careful orchestration of the mixing process to ensure the right ingredients were incorporated at the right time. The company also had to manage extreme temperature fluctuations at their plant site in El Paso, Texas, which could affect the final product. Communication was another challenge, as many of their operators were non-native English speakers. The company's highest priority was ensuring that the recipe for each compound was accurate and consistent, and that plant operators had immediate access to these formulations.

Cray Valley, a global leader in the manufacture of resins, composites and coatings, needed to update the control and monitoring of its three alkyd resin production manufacturing lines. The existing technology architecture had become obsolete and was no longer supported by the original developer. The aging PLC control system and SCADA infrastructure had no available technical support, access to spare parts or software updates, putting the entire manufacturing operation at risk. The challenge was to convert the plant to a new system capable of ensuring total visibility throughout the production process in a controlled and timely manner. The project also had to be implemented quickly to avoid disruption of manufacturing operations.

sia Abrasives Industries AG, one of the world's leading manufacturers of coated abrasives, was facing challenges with its outdated and inconsistent systems. The lack of connection between the controls of the individual production units made the planning of various production processes and the management of the machines' setup highly laborious and inefficient. Moreover, manufacturing data was administered via different, non-compatible systems, leading to errors caused by media conversions. As process data accumulated locally, significant efforts had to be made for consistent quality control due to the lack of a common database. The company decided to introduce an extensive automation solution that facilitates production control and reporting.

CF Industries, one of North America’s largest agricultural fertilizer producers, had been using a homegrown maintenance planning and tracking application developed on IBM System/36 computers and later migrated to the IBM AS400 platform. This system was effective in managing maintenance activities but keeping it in pace with CF Industries’ growing business was proving to be expensive, with investments already well over $1 million. Management reasoned that migration to a Windows-based system would enable them to continue and expand their automation-driven maintenance process improvement, while providing a familiar, easy-to-navigate desktop environment, and a standard, Internet enabled platform on which to build future enhancements.

Baxter S.A., a global diversified healthcare company, needed to revise its manufacturing facility processes to incorporate automation methods into a new production line. The new automation system needed to assist Baxter in achieving U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 21 CFR Part 11 compliance regulations. The automation system selected for the new Baxter production line had to be fully compatible with Baxter’s existing architecture and systems. The company required that the new system integrate Profibus-connected smart sensors into the new manufacturing line process. Production management had to be centralised and include reporting, analysis, traceability and performance monitoring to adhere to FDA 21 CFR Part 11 regulations as well as European compliance standards.

Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company (HC&S) is a major provider of raw sugar in Hawaii, producing about 200,000 tons annually. However, the company faces stiff competition from larger mainland sugar companies and makers of artificial sweeteners, which have been taking large bites out of the mature sugar market in recent years. To maintain its share of that market, HC&S offers its own specialty sugar brands, which cost more to produce. Therefore, efficiency becomes doubly important to achieve HC&S’s necessary cost-competitiveness. HC&S also makes something else, a “product” that it not only sells, but also uses to increase its efficiency. A fibrous residue called bagasse is used at HC&S as fuel to generate steam and electricity. Most of the steam is used to generate electricity, while the exhaust steam is funneled back into the sugar-production process. Electricity produced at the plant is also recycled back into sugar processing, with the excess power being sold to the local electric utility.

Auto-Bake, a producer of commercial machinery for the baking industry, was faced with the challenge of creating a fast yet secure production system. They aimed to design a vertical oven with a reduced footprint and increased production flexibility. The company needed an interface that would work equally well with both Rockwell Automation and Siemens programmable logic controllers (PLCs). They were also looking for an independent supplier of touch panels to replace some proprietary technologies that had become outdated. The company markets its products worldwide and thus needed to support numerous local languages.

New Belgium Brewing, the third largest craft brewery and eighth largest overall brewery in the U.S., was facing challenges in meeting the growing demand for its products. The brewery lacked real-time information on unscheduled downtimes at various equipment areas, which caused production slowdowns. The production staff were continually reacting to unscheduled downtime at equipment areas. Management needed to address gaps in methods and processes to drive improvements. The bottling operation lacked the ability to predict capabilities to effectively commit brewery staff to specific production goals.

Amalgamated Beverage Industries, a division of South African Breweries (SAB), was faced with the challenge of improving the overall production performance and accelerating the commissioning of a new packaging line to effectively address the annual summer demand for soft drinks. The facility needed to conform to Pack ML standards to ensure efficient operation of facility manufacturing equipment. The automation system had to work with existing SAP process order applications and daily production reporting facilities. The company wanted to capture all downtime data using the OMAC model of open control technologies for manufacturing applications. Another challenge was that the software project was being implemented at the same packaging line it was to monitor while it was being commissioned. During commissioning of a new factory line, all focus and effort is centered on this process. However, Amalgamated was challenged to implement both the hardware component and the software simultaneously.

Amadori Group, a leading food processing company in Italy, faced challenges in optimizing temperature management during meat processing steps. The company needed to ensure traceability, with exact temperature data for every step: processing, stocking, and preservation. They aimed to deploy a system that improves plant efficiency. However, they faced difficulty in software migration from an outdated version to a highly innovative and scalable system. They also needed to create a temperature control system that adjusts according to the external weather conditions. The most sensitive part of production was the correct management of temperature, both in the processing and in the stocking and preservation steps. Temperature must be kept constant in the cold stores used in the preservation of slaughtered meat in order to prevent it from quickly spoiling.

Bayer CropScience AG, a subsidiary of Bayer AG, is a leading innovator in the fields of crop protection, nonagricultural pest management, seeds and plant biotechnologies. The company has invested nearly 10 million euro at La Dargoire over the last two years to provide the existing laboratories with state-of-the-art equipment. The Biology department has benefitted from this investment with the creation of a new, fully-robotized system for large-scale testing of the effectiveness of new molecules on plant diseases. The FROGSS (Fungicide Rotating Greenhouse Spraying System) project was born. Its functional scope concerning the steering monitoring solution remains to be defined. The company requested a tool that was able to change easily according to needs identified during the course of the project, without jeopardizing what already existed. Their options were quickly narrowed to a Wonderware solution which offered a modular and open architecture based on market standards.

Xcellerex, a company revolutionizing the way biopharmaceuticals and vaccines are developed, manufactured, and commercialized, faced the challenge of integrating complex technology with ultra-high levels of functionality. The company aimed to create a biomanufacturing platform that employs single-use technology, controlled environment modules, process automation, and electronic batch records. The goal was to address the growing demands in the biomedical market space for more effective biopharmaceutical manufacturing processes and develop a solution that would define a model for improving how biopharmaceuticals, vaccines, and other therapeutics are developed, manufactured, and commercialized.

Fujirebio Diagnostics, a trusted source of innovative solutions in clinical diagnostics, was facing challenges with its existing paper-based GMP record system and manual process. The company was spending significant time each day manually reviewing reports. The paper-based system was not only time-consuming but also vulnerable to reporting errors. Moreover, any new system implemented had to enable the company to remain in compliance with federal regulation.

Ash Grove Cement Company, the fifth largest cement manufacturer in the United States, was facing the challenge of maximizing profit in a highly cost-competitive market. The company needed to continuously innovate and find better ways to balance both availability and utilization of its production assets. This challenge was compounded by having to develop a standardized solution that worked for each of its nine separate production facilities. The company's long-term goal was to automate maintenance data collection at each of its facilities for a well-defined enterprise asset management process to support equipment performance reliability while interfacing with its financial software, JD Edwards One World. They needed a system that they could implement to improve operations, with the scalability to contribute to sustainable development.

MMG Limited, a global mining company, was seeking to implement a standardised Asset Utilisation solution across all its operational sites. The solution needed to be flexible enough to adapt to the local operating conditions of each mine, while also providing a standardised asset utilisation data that they could analyse in real-time. The company wanted to have the capability to drill-down to the root-cause of any equipment asset that was exhibiting less than perfect utilisation, in order to drive continuous improvement through the business. The new system and processes had to be readily accepted by users everywhere, and this had to be achieved in a single sign-on environment compatible with existing systems.

Ascend Performance Materials, a global leader in the production of Nylon 6,6, was facing challenges in tracking data to ensure production efficiency and product quality. There was a lack of process consistency throughout the plants. The company was not leveraging modern technology to optimize its operations. Ascend operations had to access multiple software systems to manage day-to-day operations in an effective and secure manner. These systems generated large sets of data which contained critical information pertaining to management systems, planning and cost information in business systems and energy consumption. As a result, Ascend management was challenged with creating relevant reports reflecting performance measures in overall context of their operational process. The company’s previous process entailed collecting and analysing data manually which was not effective, since the information collected was generated after the fact, and was too complex for collaborative use across the organisation.

Hendrick Motorsports’ manufacturing complex contains six buildings, each with its own inventory warehouse. These include separate buildings for each individual racing team’s facilities. As each car is tested and modified for optimum performance on varying racetracks, its crews use parts from these buildings. Documenting the performance of each part in each possible race car configuration is important. Hendrick Motorsports (HMS) had been tracking these activities manually, which was tedious, time consuming, and costly. Scott Lampe, chief financial officer for HMS, is responsible for optimizing resource use for both on-track performance and cost. Toward this end, he implemented the Microsoft’s Business Solutions-Dynamics SL financial program, which he wanted to integrate into a single, compatible system to manage inventory, track parts usage, and maintain a historical profile of car performance. This integration required overcoming the following challenges: Coordinating information across 6 warehouses that are operated as independent entities, Tracking usage of approximately 150 components on each car, Monitoring performance reliability, Getting the system up and running within 4 months.

Vectren Corporation, a $2 billion utility company based in Evansville, Indiana, provides electricity or natural gas to nearly two-thirds of Indiana and 16 counties in Ohio. The company operates two power plants, which together use five coal-fired units and six gas turbines to produce about 1,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Keeping these plants running continuously and efficiently is vital to Vectren’s mission to serve customers. Vectren is also in the wholesale market for power sales where availability has tremendous financial implications. The company's challenge was to reduce its overall operations, maintenance, and capital spending, while keeping the availability high. As a key part of its strategy for meeting this challenge, Vectren management set out to eliminate inefficiencies in scheduling maintenance, ordering parts and keeping track of completed work.

The Southern Mississippi Electric Power Association (SMEPA) was facing a challenge of improving the heat rate and boiler efficiency while maintaining low NOx emissions at their R.D. Morrow Generating Station. The station utilizes two parallel boiler-turbine units with a capacity of 204 MW at 2400 psig. The fuel is pulverized coal from three Riley doubleend ball tube mills fed by six Stock Gravimetric feeders. The objective was to determine the most profitable operating point for the boiler and mills, as defined by a set of values for the controlled and manipulated variables in the process model.

The Water and Wastewater Division of Toronto Works and Emergency Services (WES) was operating with outdated preventive maintenance and inventory programs that were developed internally. Each facility had its own version of these programs, and the functionality was very limited. The division was spending most of its time in a reactive maintenance mode, which was identified as a productivity gap. The division aimed to shift towards a more proactive maintenance approach, which required advanced business tools and information systems.The division was involved in a broad improvement initiative called the Works Best Practices Program (WBPP). The WBPP aimed to develop a highly efficient organizational structure through the application of redesigned work practices and the acquisition of new process control and information systems. An Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system with full maintenance, inventory, and purchasing functionality was identified as a key component of the WBPP applications architecture.

Western Refining, an independent crude oil refiner and marketer of refined products throughout the Southwest, was using an aging legacy system for asset management. The system, which came with the purchase of the El Paso refinery and terminal assets from Chevron Texaco, promised powerful functionality to automate maintenance, purchasing, inventory, and related accounts payable. However, it was of an earlier generation and was deemed too complex, cumbersome, and expensive to maintain. The company felt they were missing out on opportunities to cut costs and improve efficiency. The functionality was probably there, but they just couldn’t get at it easily. Western Refining’s changing business needs prompted an evaluation of asset management system options.

Woodlands Dairy faced the challenge of integrating a second-hand powder plant from Denmark with an outdated control system into their existing operations. The control system was not suitable for the modifications required to adapt the process to Woodlands Dairy’s specifications. This prompted the company to consider how this expansion could be integrated with the rest of the site. The company needed a single platform that could integrate all the disparate plants on site while preserving past investments in expensive assets and legacy systems while making provision for future expansion. They also needed a centralized environment for process data logging which would allow them to analyze data in real-time and produce reports. The system also needed to comply with ISO 22000 standards and the project had to be completed without any interruptions to production.

The Infineum Group, a producer of additives for lubricant oils, was facing challenges in maintaining safety and productivity in their petrochemical plants. The proximity of the plants to inhabited areas made it essential for the sites to be safe and reliable at all times. The company was also struggling with the detection of critical indicators, such as vibrations or the presence of foreign particles, which automatic instruments do not usually detect effectively. The company wanted to maximize the value of the time and experience of the field operators. The company's goal was to increase the plant’s availability by anticipating any potentially damaging situations, optimize operators’ efficiency and reliability during inspection activity, and limit production downtimes to scheduled maintenance only.

Seminole County Water Division was facing the challenge of ensuring the safety of the more than 46 million gallons of water produced each day. The County had to keep an operator 24 hours a day at a SCADA desk or waiting for alarms to come in so people could be called or paged out. The County needed a better method to access data from the historian and communicate it to operators in the field. The department realised it needed to have a more mobile way of managing plant facilities and communicating among plant managers by making plant operations data more mobile so share in the field.

Fauji Fertilizer Company (FFC) was facing a challenge of training their personnel on the newly-commissioned Distributed Control System (DCS) to reduce operational incidents, increase uptime and equip operators to respond to emergencies. The company also wanted to maintain a high level of performance for experienced operators and new hires alike. Another challenge was to quickly and effectively prepare new plant operators to work in actual control room and field environments. The company was also facing manpower challenges due to upcoming retirements and anticipated higher attrition rate. The company needed a solution that could expose new hires to critical and emergency scenarios that happen only infrequently.