Software upgrade empowers Mini paint shop

The new Mini is being manufactured on one of the world's most modern and advanced production systems, including a new paint shop controlled and monitored by Cimplicity Plant Edition.

The new Mini is being manufactured on one of the world's most modern and advanced production systems at the BMW Group plant at Oxford the result of a GBP 230 million investment programme at the factory, following the decision to switch production of the car from Birmingham to Oxford in March 2000.

The foundation for the plant's transformation was set with an initial investment programme in the mid 1990s of GBP 280 million including a new paint shop.

GE Fanuc's control and monitoring software, Cimplicity Plant Edition, is enabling many of BMW Group's aims to be met within the paint shop.

One of the developments BMW Group had made at Oxford was the construction of a completely new paint shop for the Rover 75.

Since movement of Mini production to the site, investment has continued apace with the building of many new facilities and the demolition of old buildings and infrastructure.

But that is not the end of the story.

BMW Group wished to introduce far more intelligent processes at all stages in the production cycle.

The company demanded more management accessibility of real-time statuses of the processes, and a greater concentration on optimisation of production procedures.

In order to achieve this within the paint shop, the technical support team has upgraded from GE Fanuc's Cimplicity Version 3.2 to Version 5.

According to Ian Lavender at Plant Oxford, "Within the paint shop the car bodies undergo 13 different processes, during which time they can be painted in many different colours/colour combinations.

The earlier version of Cimplicity was already doing a good job for us in monitoring car bodies as they progressed through the paint shop.

However, automated control, based on captured information, was extremely limited, and production statistics were effectively historical".

The introduction of Cimplicity Plant Edition has provided a high degree of automated control which has enabled a far greater optimisation of throughput.

At the same time, an improved graphics capability has enabled the development of clearer control screens.

The use of Cimplicity WebView in broadcast mode is enabling any authorised user on the company's intranet to interrogate the system, providing access, if required, to all the control room graphic screens and to all the production statistics which are established from real time data.

Control and monitoring in the paint shop consists of three systems VMS (vehicle management system) for controlling the vehicle bodies, FMS (facility management system) for control of the facilities such as ovens and air replacement systems, and ODS (overhead display system) which manages overhead displays throughout the plant using Cimplicity Marquee.

With the introduction of Cimplicity Version 5, the BMW in-house Technical Support group has upgraded the FMS and ODS systems, and called on the help of the systems integrator, Key Systems, to develop VMS into a true control system.

The full system is now spread across 7 servers using Windows NT platforms.

The BMW Group in-house team has paid particular attention to automated capture of data onto a new server using Cimplicity's powerful SQL database facilities.

This data can be accessed by VMS and FMS.

It now provides the information in real time that has enabled optimisation of the processes within the paint shop, and the ability to display up-to-the-minute production figures.

Mark Miles from Key Systems explained.

"For the VMS we went right back to PLC level, programming routines that would provide the data which has enabled us to fully utilise the capabilities of the new Cimplicity software.

"Each customer's colour specifications are fed automatically into the paint shop control systems.

The wealth of colour options have to be accommodated, but it is very important to reduce paint changes as this affects throughput, cost and waste product handling.

The Mini design has also introduced a new challenge with the option of the car roof on Cooper and Cooper S models being a different colour from the main body.

"VMS is now able to map the car bodies far more precisely, feeding back information which helps to route them quickly and efficiently and thus increase vehicle throughput.

At the same time we have used Plant Edition's improved graphical capability to produce far more user-friendly graphics screens".

VMS handles around 14,000 data points.

Production Summary screens enable targets to be set for a shift.

At any time, the system can be interrogated to see how the facility is performing against expectations at that stage within the shift.

Clear graphics indicate percentages ahead or behind target.

These enable rapid access to other Cimplicity scripting screens that provide more detailed information on what has been causing any delays.

The Production Statistics screen compares, for example, the current shift progress versus previous shift progress after the same time lapse.

As Lavender explained, "These real-time production screens, as well as all the standard operator control screens, are available throughout the company's intranet.

I was amazed at the ease with which access could be established using GE Fanuc's WebView, without the need for HTML expertise.

Once the main index screen had been set up within WebView, the program then established its own linking procedures for the supplementary pages.

Under password protection, a user can access all three systems using a standard web browser from anywhere in the world.

"We are now developing the powerful Pager capabilities of Cimplicity so that personnel, wherever they are in the plant, can be automatically alerted by pager to key alarm signals".

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