Product category:
Plantwide control
News Release from: Silchester Control Systems | Subject: Silchester business reporting system
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 03 August 2007
System gathers data for food
manufacturer
Silchester Control Systems helped Ryvita remove bottlenecks and improve productivity.
Silchester Control Systems has completed a large-scale real-time and historical business reporting systems solution for Ryvita, Poole, part of the ABF group Ryvita has been making crispbread since 1925 and exports to over 85 countries
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 8 Feb 2000 at 8.00am (UK)
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Silchester was selected to provide a solution across all the lines that would bring the data from sensors, through the programmable controllers, into supervisory computers and out across the network as useful knowledge.
This was successfully achieved by Silchester with zero downtime and no loss of production.
After scoping the work required and approving a detailed functional design specification, Silchester installed a redundant resilient industrial fibre Ethernet network factory wide.
This formed the communications backbone for the next stages.
Scada data servers were installed on several servers, industrial touch-screen client PCs were connected and Scada displays were built up as the machine information was connected.
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Immediate savings were found by Ryvita production teams as previously held beliefs were dispelled and actual bottleneck problems targeted and rectified.
The Shift team meetings can now project trends and real-time reports to teams to show problems and identify best practices.
A 90% reduction in manual entries has now been achieved.
Reports are now available network-wide, using only Microsoft internet Explorer, the very moment the record entries are completed.
Slice/dice reporting of shift/product/line/machine/day data can be achieved using both the Citect Ampla Analyst and the power of Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence Reporting Studio.
Custom tabular, pareto, trend, pie charts and reports can be customised per person in clearly understandable dashboards and are linkable to Microsoft Dynamics NAV data.
The technology and data transport of this production management system is hidden to the end user who only needs straightforward real-time information so as to use their own skills and experience to make business decisions in a timely manner.
Effective knowledge management is a key foundation for continuous business improvements and Ryvita has seen huge leaps forward in recent years in its ability to monitor and control processes in a consistent manner.
As each new report becomes openly available the shift teams and production managers can easily see what is happening to the end product as minor changes in process are implemented.
Any downtime becomes instantly visible to anyone logged onto the Ryvita network using only a web browser and this remote network access now ensures a minimal time-to-fix culture for engineering teams.
This project has used a range of software technologies to achieve a modular user experience consistent with Ryvita's Microsoft Excel legacy reports.
This spreadsheet totalled over 40Mbyte and thousands of separate calculations taken from hundreds of manual entries.
The manual entry took many hours per week to accomplish.
Now entries are only a few short minutes per shift.
Trends are now based on real machine data and not skewed by personal interpretations.
Projectors are regularly used to display both real-time and historical information, from the Silchester systems, in the Team Leaders meetings so as to build on the open culture practices at Ryvita.
Programmed links with Microsoft Dynamics NAV ensures rapid product changes are consistent with enterprise planning and manufacturing status is immediately fed back.
Strategic decision making is enhanced and empowered with the decision platform created by Silchester.
Cevn Vibert, MES Business Manager for Silchester said "It has been a real pleasure providing a fast flexible factory-wide reporting system to the Ryvita team to enable their business improvement strategies".
Mark Chesworth, Supply Chain Director for Ryvita said: "This is a major step forward in terms of information accessibility for the site".
"It allows live data to be used by the teams in the factory to drive and improve business performance without time being wasted trying to collate vast quantities of information".
"It also enables the teams to assume real-time responsibility for driving their KPIs and to witness the results of their efforts".
"We believe this evolution will prove to be truly empowering for our production staff".
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