As modern automation systems require more scalability and connectivity, automation software that provides remote control, flexible visualization, interoperability and more accessibility has become a necessity on the plant floor.
Leading companies in the pharmaceutical and food processing industries were recently looking for a platform that would meet these demands, and both found their answer with software from Inductive Automation.
Inductive Automation provides a modular, web-based platform for controlling the plant floor and for connecting to the edge and the cloud. This gives industrial organizations a standardized control system framework to connect to practically any industrial device with open-standard technologies and unlimited tags, clients, connections and designers.
The platform allows users to create applications to run and visualize operations that can work on any screen size and is compatible with major operating systems, making it suitable for both mobile devices and stationary screens.
Following is a description of how a pharmaceutical company and a food company are transforming and revitalizing their systems with Inductive Automation software.
Upgrading alarm management
The pharmaceutical manufacturer enlisted control system integrator Grantek to develop an advanced alarm management system for its Pennsylvania facility using Inductive Automation’s software. The system supports alarm monitoring, historization and management for more than 10,000 alarm points while effectively handling up to 30,000 daily alarm events. It also includes tools for point change management and metadata tracking, which are crucial for the pharmaceutical company’s site administrators.
Given the stringent regulations in pharmaceutical manufacturing, this manufacturer required a robust alarm management system that would meet FDA guidelines. This new system needed the ability to add alarm data from the manufacturer’s existing Siemens PLCs and through OPC tags for other systems. Grantek mapped these data through the pharmaceutical company’s Matrikon OPC Server, which simplified tag verification and eliminated the need to verify tags back to the PLCs.
Inductive Automation’s software provided alarm management capabilities, allowing users to enter comments for active alarms, which would be historized for review. Also, the system was integrated with Microsoft’s Active Directory to ensure secure access for designated users, and it was able to configure reports to be filterable by time and other parameters.
Grantek connected 22,000 tags and 11,000 alarm points through an OPC/DA server architecture, with plans to integrate 96 new Allen-Bradley PLCs. Grantek also developed a real-time alarm management workflow, enabling operators to view, dispatch, acknowledge and annotate alarm events throughout their lifecycle. Additionally, the system’s views enabled advanced alarm data filtering, providing comprehensive metadata and response status in a user-friendly interface.
Grantek’s solution allowed administrators to perform detailed configuration updates and manage alarms through the application frontend and included automatic notifications, report distribution and a high-availability database architecture for extensive data retention. The system also included custom data archiving and a report schedule builder, which allowed the pharmaceutical company to efficiently manage historical data and maintain regulatory compliance. Additionally, ad hoc and filterable reports provided flexibility, while user interface tools enabled users to manage point metadata and notifications.
Modernizing legacy SCADA
The food company turned to control system integrator Tamaki Control to replace its outdated, inconsistent SCADA systems with a comprehensive, user-friendly system that could seamlessly integrate new technologies, consolidate pre-existing solutions and replace its legacy systems without making changes to PLC code. The manufacturer chose Inductive Automation’s software to provide a control system framework for the upgrade of its existing SCADA system to the latest software version while re-engineering it to function with a common Microsoft SQL Server database.
One of the main challenges for Tamaki Control was developing a library of application views, including symbols, pop-ups, navigation and piping, all while maintaining performance, reliability and consistency across 10 different sites with 220,000 tags and 50,000 alarms. The components had to be compatible with varying tag data types from existing structures.
The food manufacturer’s different screen resolutions and mobile accessibility required a responsive user interface design that was adaptable to different screen sizes. Tamaki Control created lightweight SVG graphics as the foundation for the food company’s symbols and used styles from CSS and the software for consistent coloring and styling across over 100 screens. The software’s theme system allowed users to customize the screens to their preferences while ensuring consistency across all of the company’s sites.
Tamaki Control integrated the SCADA system with the company's CloudSuite ERP system through REST API and developed an operator interface for interacting with manufacturing orders. It also designed a robust security system using identity providers, with roles and areas governing access levels at both the tag and component levels and integrated it with the company's enterprise-wide Active Directory.
The software’s tag-drop feature allowed the food company’s SCADA engineers to easily integrate tags into any view, speeding up the development process. They were also able to use pre-built plant equipment symbols that could be resized and modified and draw lines with colors based on variables like water, product or steam with the software’s pipe tool.
Tamaki Control used the software to provide the food company with centralized visibility and control. This allowed the company to launch visualization projects from anywhere within its network, broadening access to managers, supervisors, engineers, and analysts.
The software’s project inheritance feature enabled the food company to separate standard and site-specific components, simplifying the deployment of standard projects across different sites. This allows users to access the SCADA system data from an iPad using a native iOS app, fulfilling the food company’s goal of providing data enterprise-wide.
Dante Augello is marketing content writer at Inductive Automation.
