Plant and System Availability with SIMATIC IT

Reliable Availability Grupo AC Marca: MES solution with SIMATIC IT SIMATIC IT Answers for industry. “We opted for the Agent-based Diagnosis Service becau- se the 24/7 remote monitoring by a qualified technical support team allows us to detect and anticipate potential failures. This optimizes our responsiveness and mini- mizes maintenance time and thus production downtime. The agents also contribute to continuous improvements by revealing minor errors that are otherwise hard to tra- ce, and assisting with hotfixes and system upgrades.” Mr Jordi Clapes, IT Director AC Marca Plant and System Availability with SIMATIC IT AC Marca has achieved maximum flexibility and efficiency in the production processes at its new plant in Sant Llorenç d’Hortons. This was the result of implementing SIMATIC IT MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) to cover production management and establish real-time interoperability with SAP. To ensure optimum availability of both the plant and the systems AC Marca opted for the Agent-based Diagnosis Services offered by Siemens, for predictive and preventive maintenance. 2 The customer The business challenge Grupo AC Marca is a Spanish manuf- To AC Marca it is of greatest importance acturer of a wide range of products to have the flexibility and agility in place for home and personal care as well as to meet its customers’ requirements. DIY products. From its headquarters in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, near Barcelona, The construction of a new plant in Sant the company operates a total of five fac- Llorenç d’Hortons was the ideal occasion tories, two in Spain, one in France, one to make this flexibility an integral aspect in Czech Republic and one in Mexico, and of production, and gain production effi- sales offices in 8 countries. ciency and operational cost reductions at the same time. AC Marca’s extensive product portfolio in- The existing manual and paper-based cludes a large variety of detergents, floor processes and information exchange wax, dies, shoe polish, hair gel, shampoo, could not cover this strategy, so it was glues, etc. Many of their brands such decided to bring in a MES to manage the as IBERIA, NORIT, ORION, GIORGI, LIDA, production and automate production or- ALEX, PASO, YAK, BRIL are local market ders, material consumption, notifications, leaders. production quantities, pallet labeling, … The location in Sant Llorenç d’Hortons covers the production of household From a functional point of view this products such as Norit, Gior, Iberia, Yak, production management system had to Sanytol, and personal care products inclu- offer the possibility to integrate different ding Giorgi, Lida, Hidrogenesse, Cabello production units in one single system. It Sano Ecran, etc. had to provide a standard interface with On top of the manufacturing activities the SAP system to allow real-time mutual the 26.000 m2 premises also house the data exchange and communication with services and logistics and R&D depart- the machines in production, as well as ments. All of which is handled by a work- personnel management and automatic force of 150. label management. 3 The solution SIMATIC IT now covers functionality such SIMATIC IT visualizes which production as process management, SAP integration, order is active on which production line, Several arguments justified the selection personnel management, production or- and the output quantities. of Siemens’ MES SIMATIC IT. der management, material management, When the pallet of final products leaves Siemens was the only vendor offering downtime management, box and pallet the production line SAP is notified and hardware, software as well as services, labeling, traceability, CIP/PIG registering, feeds back the product description for and able to automate both the discrete as and basic data collection from process the labels to MES which functions as the well as the process manufacturing areas, and filling lines. interface to the label printer. and cover the connection to SAP with an Process management is handled through All of this is done automatically, no per- MES system. the SIMATIC IT Production Modeler which sonnel traffic, no paper traffic required. SIMATIC IT offers a single platform co- allows to define a clear and integrated vering the complete MES layer and in- model of plant operations. tegrates seamlessly with other Siemens systems such as the PCS7 process control The SIMATIC IT Production Modeler trig- system. This was particularly important gers the different system components to accomplish the predefined integrated to initiate certain operations. This also production management model. includes the functionality offered by PCS7 Siemens was also able to function as the and SIMATIC Batch, such as recipe defi- system integrator for the MES system. nition and management, automatic or This reduced the number of involved manual batch execution, process control parties, facilitated the communication points and process data acquisition. during the project and helped speed up For instance, equipment and pipe clea- the start of operations. ning (CIP/PIG) are scheduled and can be When starting the production at the new registered to avoid contamination in case plant in Sant Llorenç d’Hortons the ma- of product switchovers. nagement wanted basic MES functionali- The interaction with SAP is bidirectional ty covered from the start. and consists in the downloading from The entire system was in fact native to SAP to SIMATIC IT of production orders, the plant. Being fully embedded from the master data, … and the uploading and design phase, when a new production notification from MES to SAP of infor- line in the Greenfield plant was ready mation such as production output, order to become operational, so was the MES status, line personnel status, quality con- system. trol,… 4 At a glance Solution: • SIMATIC IT Production Suite Company: • SIMATIC IT Agent-based Diagnosis Service Grupo AC MARCA Industry: CPG Key Benefits: • reduced operational and administrative costs Key Challenges: • accurate real-time data for decision support • efficient, paperless data exchange • improved responsiveness (plant, customers and • plant and system availability regulatory) • integrated process and production model This increased efficiency, and resulting reboot is initiated. When Agents are in The pay-off cost savings and profit increases make it place the problem will be reported to the more important than ever to guarantee TSS as soon as it occurs or even before it SIMATIC IT has played an important role system availability and continuity. actually happens. Through a secure VPN in the introduction of the integrated The people at AC MARCA were well aware connection the TSS team has the neces- management model which in turn of this. sary visibility on the system to verify the substantially contributed to the reduction In case of a system failure the entire cause of the problem and, in agreement of operational costs. production process may come to a halt. with the customer, can do a remote re- The scalable and modular approach of The time it takes to solve the problem is boot of the system within minutes. No SIMATIC IT allows roll-out and scaling of money lost, so qualified people need to data are lost. The downtime is nihil. the solution towards other plants in the be available to deliver immediate solu- Afterwards this case is analyzed and the AC MARCA Group. tions. As work shifts at the plant cover necessary steps can be taken to prevent over 16 hours per day, and master data the problem from occurring again. The implementation of the integrated synchronization takes place at night, production model has not only seriously ensuring a 24/7 supervision was hardly reduced the amount of time and costs an exaggerated measure.