Meaningful plant data aid process optimisation

By installing CitectIIM on top of an existing CitectScada system, Amcor has been able to leverage its plant data into an information resource.

Amcor Beverage Cans operates a plant that manufactures roughly 2 million aluminium drink can bodies per day.

The company's management wanted to implement a system to automatically capture downtime and plant throughput information down to a machine level and calculate from these data, in real time, a series of performance metrics for the plant.

These metrics are intended to be used to drive a series of process improvement initiatives.

The primary performance metrics of interest are overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): availability, performance and quality.

Amcor is one of the world's top three global packaging companies, with over Au $11 billion in annual sales and is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.

It has about 30,000 employees, manufacturing sites in 40 countries.

Internationally, the company is focused on four key market segments: PET plastic bottles and jars, closures and specialty packaging, flexible plastic packaging and specialty printed cartons.

The Revesby site manufactures aluminium can bodies for drinks (beer, soft drinks etc) and has a theoretical production capacity of just under 2.5 million cans per day.

The process operates as a single production line comprising multiple work areas.

Some of the work areas have multiple machines, and therefore have some built-in redundancy.

Others are single machines, which makes them a single point of failure.

The most critical of these is the decorator, which applies full colour graphics to each can individually at an operating rate of 1700 cans per minute.

Amcor is facing stiff competition in the low-margin can making business.

It is therefore imperative that it gets the best possible performance out of its installed equipment.

At the plant level, this means being able to identify the systemic causes of lost production, and measuring the impact of improvement initiatives.

At head office level, it means being able to monitor the relative performances of the various can-making plants, taking into account the differences in installed equipment and product mix.

By installing CitectIIM on top of Revesby's existing CitectScada system, Amcor was able to leverage its plant data into an information resource that could be used to drive improvement initiatives, and monitor the plant performance on an ongoing basis.

For Amcor head office, it is the first step in a process improvement initiative that will soon spread to all their can-making plants.

CitectIIM was chosen by Amcor because of its seamless integration with plant systems and its ability to capture detailed plant data.

From these data, CitectIIM can synthesise the various performance metrics required, while still allowing plant management to drill down into the historical detail, when this is required.

Citect provided the CitectIIM performance modules of downtime, production and metrics, and the professional services to configure them to meet Amcor's business requirements.

CitectIIM has given Amcor the ability to record real-time operational data at the plant, work area and machine levels, and to generate metrics (such as performance), at each of these three levels.

Amcor believes this fine-grained level of detail is essential to optimise the performance of its plant as a whole, and to allow it to be meaningfully compared with other can-making plants both within Amcor, and externally.

Manufacturing aluminium drink cans starts with reels of thin aluminium sheet (coils), which are unrolled, lubricated, and have discs punched out of them.

These discs are then pressed through a series of punches and dies until can bodies of the correct size and shape are created.

The necks of these cans must be trimmed to produce straight edges.

The upright can bodies are then passed on a conveyor through a series of spray washers, which clean and dry them.

The clean, bright cans are then fed into the decorator in which each can is placed on a mandrel, and printed using a high-resolution offset lithographic printing process.

The insides of the printed cans are then spray-coated with a lacquer, to prevent corrosion of the aluminium by the liquid that will eventually be placed in the cans.

The cans then move by conveyor through an oven which bakes on the lacquer, then into the "necker", a machine that progressively crimps the neck of the can until it is the correct diameter, and finally flares the outer edge to create a flange.

The completed cans are then passed individually through an automated camera inspection unit and, if no flaws are found, packed onto pallets by an automatic palletiser.

Amcor's fundamental objective is to maximise the throughput of the entire plant.

Superficially, it would appear this is constrained by one machine - the decorator - which prints the graphics on each can, and operates at a maximum rate of 1700 cans per minute.

However, for many reasons, this ideal rate is seldom achieved for a prolonged period of time.

Prior to the advent of the CitectIIM installation, the primary causes of lost production were not apparent to plant management, and consequently it was difficult to effectively focus and prioritise its performance improvement initiatives.

The CitectIIM system has provided Amcor with more immediate, more detailed information than before.

This has given plant management the ability to quickly identify the main causes of lost production, and then to hone in on certain causes to try and identify common factors.

Although there is no doubt this is already helping Amcor improve plant performance, the precise measure of how large this improvement has been has not yet been assessed.

From project inception to live operation took 10 months.

While the system is not yet fully operational (some sensors still need to be installed), it is sufficiently close to being fully operational that useful data are being extracted, and acted on.

Citect Professional Services took responsibility for all aspects of the design, implementation, commissioning and testing of the system, and for training the users.

The CitectIIM configuration in this project is unusual in that it goes down to a very low level of detail - the machine level - in the data it collects (it is more usual to go no lower than the work area level of detail).

This results in a surprisingly large system configuration for the plant.

A second unusual feature of the system is that the high noise levels in the plant, and the very dirty working conditions in certain areas, mean that it is impractical to expect operators to manually enter downtime cause codes.

The solution was to automatically generate these cause codes from knowledge of the current state of the plant.

Although this inevitably means making some assumptions and compromises, the accuracy of the cause data is generally considered perfectly adequate.

Prior to the advent of CitectIIM the Amcor Operations Manager was spending up to one day per month manually collecting and collating plant performance data to report to head office.

With CitectIIM, this work has simply disappeared, and he is able to generate a much wider range of performance data at the press of a button.

In tandem with the CitectIIM implementation, the customer has also upgraded its Scada system to provide better real-time plant floor information.

Using these two systems in concert, Plant Management's focus will now shift to machine and work area level initiatives to alleviate bottlenecks, reduce downtime, and address the primary causes of wastage in the plant.

It is still early days, but it is already quite clear that CitectIIM will transform the operational management of the Amcor plant in Revesby.

Rapid access to accurate information on the plant's current, and past performance will enable plant management to take prompt, targeted corrective action whenever plant performance drops.

While Revesby is the first site to undertake such a development, the longer term plan is to implement the same system in all six Amcor can-making plants, so that the performance of each can be measured, and compared with the others.

Amcor now has better visibility of its beverage can operations in Revesby without requiring further human resources or manual analysis.

It also provides the plant manager with greater autonomy as he can identify problems or bottlenecks and solve them before they critically affect the plant production.

Amcor sees its commitment to Citect as ongoing, as it uses the Revesby beverage can example to drive a rollout of CitectIIM across the organisation.

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