The packaging lines at Auckland’s New Zealand Sugar..

…….Company are running more productively than ever, following the installation of specialised software that’s helped operators optimise their equipment and boost efficiency.

The improvements follow the refinery’s recent installation of an Ampla real-time reporting system designed to identify bottlenecks, production inefficiencies and analyse the causes of downtime. By addressing these issues, operators can use local Magelis HMIs to fine-tune processes to maintain quality and minimise waste.

Ampla is part of an manufacturing execution systems (MES) suite from Schneider Electric designed to monitor, gather and report on production data from manufacturing processes.  Citect SCADA and Historian are used to collect and stores the data monitored by the system in a MSQL database.  Historian gives plant operators the ability to analyse trends and production patterns and Ampla generates reports from the data in real time.

The previous system involved creating spreadsheets, and a major problem was the age of the data which was often more than a week old. While the data could identify an anomaly in the production process, trying to pinpoint the cause was very difficult because it relied upon old data and the operators’ memories.

With the real-time reporting and the graphic representation of data available from Ampla it became faster and simpler to tweak the production for optimum performance. Reports generated automatically by the system whenever required.

Shop floor HMIs

With Ampla generating management reports, it was the simplification of local control offered by the software’s connection to the Magelis Smart+ HMIs on the shop floor that was popular with the operators and offered additional benefits.

According to a facility’s control and automation engineer, “It’s very easy to customise Ampla for reporting. For our shop floor HMIs we’ve created a ‘dash board’ – a graphic which the packaging line operators can view at a glance.”

“It displays information such as machine throughput, the rate of fill and the weight of each bag. It records the operators’ quality checks on the integrity of the seals. Operators can now monitor the amount of sugar going into each bag and take immediate corrective action.

The next step

The initial focus of the Ampla installation was the facility’s packaging lines. The project is now being extended to the refining process itself, where a key focus will be the monitoring and analysis of energy consumption, by integrating the Altivar 32 VSDs and NSX Breakers from Schneider Electric.

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