Manufacturing execution system delivers 90% cut in manual reporting

Implemented by Citect systems integrator, Silchester Control Systems, the company says it has resulted in “major improvements in efficiency, accuracy [and] transparency in reporting.” The Ampla system is now the backbone of Ryvita’s flexible factory- wide reporting system, integrating both SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and Citect Reports – installed by Silchester, together with Citect Professional Services, with zero downtime and no loss of production. Says Mark Chesworth, supply chain director for Ryvita: “This is a major step forward in terms of information accessibility for the site. It allows live data to be used by the teams in the factory to drive and improve business performance, without time being wasted trying to collate vast quantities of information. “It also enables the teams to assume real time responsibility for driving their KPIs and to witness the results of their efforts. We believe this evolution will prove to be truly empowering for our production staff.” “The major bottleneck to improved production efficiency was the requirement for each shift to provide manual entries to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that was the crux of all production operations,” explains Trevor Jones, managing director of Silchester. “The spreadsheet totalled over 40Mb and involved thousands of individual calculations from hundreds of manual entries, which took many hours a week to input. Moreover, as the inputs were all manual they could become subjective and inaccurate – resulting in production bottlenecks that were difficult to rectify.” The new system provides automatic inputs from sensors across the factory, through the installed base of Schneider PLCs into supervisory computers, and out across the network. Silchester installed the CitectSCADA system on several servers, while a number of touch-screen client PCs were connected – SCADA displays being built up as the machine information was connected. Citect’s Ampla MES system then sits on top, collecting, collating and analysing data from multiple input sources, and providing high level reporting.