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Departments: Quality Applications
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Software Helps Monitor Maintenance Levels

Software Helps Monitor Maintenance Levels
Rockwell's RSBizWare Historian

Manufacturing air conditioners, whether industrial or commercial units, is a complex process. Casings, condensers, fans, valves, electronic controls, heat dissipaters and other components all have individual production rates that must correspond and integrate smoothly for the final assembly process. With these production pressures, it's critical that plant personnel can accurately track and access real-time production information for productivity trends and downtime analysis. If production of one component stalls, it can affect the entire manufacturing process, leading to lower overall productivity and significant coordination problems.

At the Trane Co.'s Tyler, Texas, air conditioner plant, the company wanted to track information about specific machines on its assembly line in order to provide plant floor operators and managers access to real-time information. This would allow the company to identify production totals, uptime/downtime and, most important, why a machine would fail to work at the optimum level in the first place. Being able to reduce product or service failure rates to a negligible level (roughly 3.4 failures per million opportunities) would mean that Trane had reached Six Sigma status.

Trane decided to install a new control system as well as other software to track information from the controllers and other devices on the assembly line. To make this as seamless as possible, the machines would have to be integrated. Trane chose to implement the Rockwell Software RSSql transaction manager to do so.

First in line for the Six Sigma focus was the plant's spine-fin wrapping section--the component with the most potential to disrupt the entire production process and reduce finished product assembly rates. Each of Trane's 60 spine-fin wrapper machines is used to continually wrap and glue a 0.0005 by 1 in. band of ribbon around a 0.375 in. pipe that runs up through the center of the wrapping machine. The finished product is a continuous length of pipe with a ribbon edge fanning out perpendicularly to the pipe--similar to the fanned edge of a car's radiator.

"One of our biggest challenges was simply maintaining production levels," says Paul Milwood, senior principal engineer at Trane. "If the spine-fin wrappers can't keep up with the rest of the plant's production areas, we can't increase overall production."

Under the previous system, analog counters measured the linear amount of wrapped pipe produced by each spine-fin wrapping machine. This system could be inaccurate, and it didn't offer a mechanism for measuring or capturing a machine's uptime and downtime. Trane wanted to collect production data from each spine fin.

Trane's application could be controlled with standard PLC-based control, but Allen-Bradley's SoftLogix was a better solution. The controller takes control functions normally found on a dedicated programmable controller, encapsulates the functions in software and runs them on a commercial operating system. Allen-Bradley's PanelView 300 monitors stationed at each bank of wrappers give operators easy access to the system's data, and operators can monitor the entire system via stations running Rockwell Software's RSView32 operator interface.

Rockwell, a leading provider of contact management technologies and applications, serves customers in more than 80 countries. The company's RSBizWare Historian is a complete, Windows-based solution for the analysis of time-series process and production data. By building on the reporting, analysis and management capabilities of the RSBizWare foundation, Historian provides an easy-to-use set of tools for analyzing a variety of typical process data, including temperatures, pressures and flow rates. The software helps companies attack process variability through the analysis of process and production data, such as temperatures, pressures and flow rates.

Rockwell Software RSSql acts as an interface between the SoftLogix controller and a Microsoft SQL Server database running in the engineering department. RSSql transfers information, such as production totals, uptime and reason codes, from the wrapping machine into the database, where it can be stored and analyzed.

The RSBizWare Historian allows Trane to track and analyze the production data and provides users with an understanding of how a process is performing. The predesigned data models are optimized for time-series data, and Historian supports the analysis of a wide variety of production data by connecting to any database via ODBC. Using a set of analysis tools, Trane can analyze time-series data sets and use the reporting, graphing and querying functions of the software.

Trane initially planned to use RSBiz- Ware Historian software mainly for maintenance issues but saw the capabilities it had for production. The company found that Six Sigma issues fell into place with RSBizWare, and Black Belt training of some of the employees was absorbed into the process. "The Historian has made a tremendous difference," says Milwood. "It has helped us focus on the operators, and our production has increased about 10 percent."

Rockwell's RSBizWare Historian

Benefits:

  • Enables users to make informed decisions
  • Collects, analyzes, visualizes and reports on-time series process data
  • Provides direct connectivity to enterprise applications

www.rsbizware.com