What Gets Measured, Gets Done!

A case study from a leading supplier of products and technologies for the medical and life sciences industry. As a global player, the company analyses complex tasks and provides additional innovative solutions to make laboratories more productive, improve patient recovery through new diagnostic methods, and enable new therapies.

The Task - Make the difference: Live production data tracking inside and outside the factory

As the demand for viral transport media and so-called agar plates increased worldwide, the company expanded its production capacities at their site in the UK, eleven new production lines were built for this purpose. To monitor these individual lines, all operating data was to be recorded, evaluated and visualised. Live production data is displayed clearly on a large screen for all employees. Simultaneously, this operating data can be viewed and accessed remotely by both the plant management at the site and the headquarters located in the USA.

The Plan - Monitoring production data in real time

The Headquarters are already successfully using Red Lion's ProducTVity Station (PTV for short) as a data visualisation at its USA site. The ProducTVity Station displays KPI (Key Performance Indicator) data and Andon messages in real time on large televisions. PTV enables the creation of sophisticated production scoreboards, making the system ideal for factory flors, manufacturing plants, and other locations where performance needs to be tracked and monitored.

The decision to assign Red Lion Controls as the automation specialist for the expanded production site was, therefore, a quick one.

Unlike PTV, however, the company decided to use Red Lion's DA50A Advanced IIoT Gateway. The gateway is part of the intelligent edge automation platform FlexEdge, which offers many flexible functions for the acquisition and digitalisation of plant and machine data. Among many features for implementing OT/IT convergence in smart factories, FlexEdge offers easy adaptation to changing environments and new technologies. The Sled architecture offers a fast exchange of communication modules (e.g. 4G to 5 G on site) without interrupting production. The hardware is also ATEX and IECEx certified.

At the heart of the FlexEdge platform is the powerful automation software Crimson 3.2, developed and owned by Red Lion. Crimson captures and converts all industry-standard protocols for connectivity to SCADA and ERP systems, as well as for logging data into a database. A pre-figured MQTT makes connecting to the most common cloud providers simple and easy.

Achieved With LC Automation:

• On site training for Crimson
• Assisted?connection of a DA50 with an Allen Bradley and Siemens PLC for each machine
• The DA50’s on each machine performed OEE calculations and displayed them on the virtual HMI which could be access from the office over the company's?local network
• A Master DA50 was installed which collated the data and OEE figures from each local DA50 using Modbus TCP protocol
• The Master logged all of the figures and synchronised the data logs with their SQL server
• The Master also had a virtual HMI screen which shown an overview of each machines performance and was displayed on a large smart TV on the factory floor along with being available in the office over their local network

Operating Data Clearly Visualised

At the production site, the DA50A Advanced IIOT gateways are connected to Siemens and Alan Bradley PLCs on the production lines. As the Crimson 3.2 software is manufacturer-independent and configures more than 300 protocols via point-and-click configuration, the machine I/O's can be queried directly. The production figures, OEE data, and error data are clearly visualised on the production lines via the integrated web server and displayed on a smart TV in the hall.

However, FlexEdge solution also realises the exchange of information across locations via remote access. The headquarters uses the integrated FlexEdge remote viewer to visualise the production data provided by the integrated by the integrated webserver on a local PC or TV. This allows them to monitor data in real time.

Another highlight is the Wi-Fi connectivity provided by the DA50 FlexEdge Gate. It enables the user to remotely monitor and track the number and production history of mobile vats within the plant. The mobile vats are seeded bacterial colonies produced for life science research projects,

A key factor in the success of this project was the local support provided by LC Automation, the local Red Lion distributor, who visited the site and offered system set up, staff training, and technical support, all in conjunction with Red Lion's own support team.

"The solution recommended by us and Red Lion Engineers convinced the customer technically, they were surprised how easy it was to use. The feedback was correspondingly positive. Another plus point was the quick and uncomplicated installation and commissioning. They were able to benefit from the know-how of the automation specialists and now have a fantastic solution for data acquisition, data analysis and visualisation on the new product lines. Further FlexEdge DA50s are purchased to start installing on the other production lines." - A comment from LC Automation

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