There are many different kinds of improvement initiatives that can be undertaken in order to make your plant run more efficiently as well as several tools that can be leveraged to help achieve your goals. The monitoring and tracking of uptime and downtime of key processing segments in the manufacturing facility is one of these initiatives and is one that can provide a significant boost to a company's bottom line. Organizations interested in improvement can utilize several products from Wonderware that help address this need and provide detailed analysis of the data that is already available in your existing control infrastructure.
For those customers requiring detailed downtime data,
operator involvement with the improvement
process, and the ability to track OEE in real-time,
Wonderware has a fully functional out-of-the-box
downtime tracking solution in the DT Analyst product. DT
Analyst combines a simple point-and-click interface to
allow you to configure Equipment relationships and
states to monitor, Event Monitors that provide for
Operator interaction with downtime occurrences, and
equipment efficiency (OEE) calculations that normalize
equipment performance. This data is presented through
800+ standard web-based reports of system performance.
With the ability to evaluate logic outside of the
control system, it is a natural fit for industries that
currently have validated systems.
Should your performance monitoring needs be less specific, Wonderware also has a full featured process historian in the InSQL Server product. InSQL has the ability to acquire large amounts of data and store it in a relational database format for easy analysis. Combining the InSQL process historian with Wonderware's ActiveFactory client tools creates a robust platform for extracting Plant Intelligence that can certainly be utilized to reveal basic uptime/downtime for equipment in the plant.
InSQL can store several types of data: Discrete, Analog, Message, Event, and Summary data. Through the ActiveFactory Workbook plug-in to Microsoft Excel, any or all of this data can be pulled into single location for reporting and analysis. Since InSQL provides time-domain extensions to the data retrieval, this information can be easily correlated and evaluated on shift, day, week, or monthly basis.
The ActiveFactory utilities provide several out-of-the-box analysis tools. The Discrete Tag Analysis is very useful when determining Machine Uptime and Downtime % over a specific time period as well as the total number of number of Machine State transitions. The Analog Tag Analysis provides the ability to report statistics when the Machine Speed is either too slow or too fast. There is also a Batch Analysis that will allow the comparison of machine performance over two distinct time ranges, an Analog-Discrete Analysis that will allow you to compare both tag types over a time range, and an Analog at Discrete Transition Analysis that can report things like Machine Speeds at a Downtime Events.
Whatever your specific production improvement initiatives require, Q-mation and Wonderware have solutions to help meet your goals. If you would like any further information on the products discussed, please contact your sales engineer or email us at sales@qmation.com.
For additional information, please feel free to call you local Q-mation sales engineer!