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
- 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
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