Software combo really can make a difference

The combination of Citect's Ampla MES and CitectScada has cut plant reporting time from one day to a few minutes per month for Amcor, one of world's top three packaging companies.

The combination of Citect's Ampla MES (manufacturing execution system) and CitectScada has cut plant reporting time from one day to a few minutes per month for Amcor, one of world's top three global packaging companies.

In addition, Ampla has given Amcor the ability to record real-time operational data at the plant, work area and machine levels, and to generate metrics at each of these three levels to optimise production.

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, Amcor is one of the world's top three global packaging companies, with over Au $11 billion in annual sales, 30,000 employees and manufacturing sites in 40 countries.

The company, which derives about 80% of its earnings from outside Australasia, offers a wide range of packaging and packaging-related services, including: corrugated boxes; cartons; aluminium and steel cans; flexible plastic packaging; PET plastic bottles and jars, closures and multi-wall sacks.

In addition, Amcor Beverage Cans operates a plant in Revesby, manufacturing 2 million aluminium drink can bodies per day.

The challenge facing management at Amcor's Revesby plant was to implement a system to automatically capture downtime and plant throughput information down to a machine level and calculate from this data, in real time, a series of performance metrics for the plant to drive a series of process improvement initiatives.

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

The Revesby site 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 which have multiple machines and therefore there is some built-in redundancy.

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

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

However, this rate was seldom achieved for prolonged periods of time.

Facing stiff competition, it was imperative that Amcor get the best possible performance out of its installed equipment by maximising throughput and achieving consistent quality.

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 taking into account the differences in installed equipment and product mix and being able to monitor the relative performance of the various can-making plants.

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

From its suite of Ampla modules, Citect provided downtime, production and metrics, and the professional services to configure them to meet Amcor's business requirements.

Project inception to live operation took 10 months.

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

The Ampla 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.

Secondly, the high noise levels in the plant 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.

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

Using these two systems in concert, plant management's focus has shifted to machine and work area level initiatives to alleviate bottlenecks, reduce downtime and address the primary causes of wastage in the plant.

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

The Ampla system has provided Amcor with more immediate, more detailed information than it has ever had available before.

Plant management can now quickly identify the main causes of lost production not just of the decorator but throughout the plant, and to hone in on certain causes to try to identify common factors.

Prior to using Ampla, the Amcor Operations Manager was spending up to a day a month manually collecting and collating plant performance data to report to head office.

This work has simply disappeared and a far greater range of performance data is available at the press of a button.

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

This project is an example of Amcor's market leadership in adopting new technologies to improve plant performance and produce a healthier bottom line.

With CitectScada and Ampla, Amcor has cut back plant-reporting time from one day to a few minutes per month.

Ampla has given Amcor the ability to record real-time operational data at the plant, work area and machine levels, and to generate metrics at each of these three levels.

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

Plant managers have greater autonomy as they can identify problems or bottlenecks down to an individual machine level, and solve them before they critically affect plant production.

Although Revesby is the first site to undertake such a development, Amcor plans to implement the same Ampla system in all six Amcor can-making plants.

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