Data lights up production control

Philip Morris International is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of tobacco products, with 70 manufacturing plants worldwide. Its site in Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands, is the largest cigarette factory in Europe, employing 1800 and producing 90 billion filter cigarettes each year. It was here that the company needed to optimise production: it knew that an information ‘gap’ existed between the shopfloor and management. Forty parallel production lines combine paper, filters and tobacco to make up to 12,000 cigarettes every minute. As the machine controllers didn’t send data to a central system, management could not see up-to-date production data. Data such as run times, messages, signals and malfunctions, needed to be recorded as well as production quantities, weights and quality. The company decided on ethernet TCP/IP as the connecting element between its IT systems and production. This interface offered uniform communication throughout the company. As the factory’s existing Siemens S5 controllers on the cigarette-making machines did not have TCP/IP on board, an ethernet interface was needed. The company selected Echolink, a serial ethernet converter device manufactured by INAT. “Up-to-date information is now available to us,” says Sven Kok, an electrical engineer at Philip Morris. “This allows us to monitor the performance of machines and production. Performance and quality problems can now be detected and analysed early, so that appropriate measures can be taken in time.” The Echolink device is distributed in the UK by MAC Solutions.