Citect factory data system takes the biscuit for Ryvita

 London - Ryvita, part of the Associated British Foods Group, has achieved a 90% reduction in manual inputs across the production system at its Poole, UK site through the installation of  Citect’s Ampla MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) system. Installed by Citect systems integrator, Silchester Control Systems Ltd, the system is also providing major improvements in efficiency, accuracy, transparency in reporting, according to the vendor.

Over recent years, Ryvita has been developing a new outlook to manufacturing and delivered many new products via its TQM programme and best practice management initiatives. However, to drive further improvements the company required a fast, flexible factory-wide reporting system to overcome the major obstacle to production of manual data entry, and generate better data on system efficiencies, downtime and product tracking.

“This is a major step forward in terms of information accessibility for the site," said Mark Chesworth, supply chain director for Ryvita. "It allows live data to be used by the teams in the factory to drive & 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. "

According to Trevor Jones, managing director of Silchester, the major bottleneck to improved production efficiency was the requirement for each shift to provide manual entries to a Microsoft Excel legacy reports spreadsheet that was the crux of all production operations: "The spreadsheet totalled over 40Mb and involved thousands of individual calculations from hundreds of manual entries, which took many hours a week to input. Moreover, as the inputs were all manual they could become subjective and inaccurate, resulting in production bottlenecks that were difficult to rectify."

The answer, said Jones, was to provide automatic inputs from sensors across the factory, through the installed base of Schneider PLCs into supervisory computers, and out across the network as useful knowledge. To acquire the data automatically, a SCADA system was required. Silchester recommended a CitectSCADA system, in part because Citect is part of the Schneider Alliance and so could simplify the task of interfacing to the installed PLCs.

The CitectSCADA was installed on several servers, and a number of industrial touch-screen client PCs were connected as clients, their SCADA displays being built up as the machine information was connected. The  Ampla MES system, meanwhile, performs the tasks of collecting, collating and analysing data from multiple input sources, and provides high level reporting.

Ampla is a scalable suite of MES solutions that delivers real-time access to aggregated plant and business intelligence, according to Citect. The system, it said, allows key personnel to analyse and act on opportunities to refine the workflow, maximise overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and to correct problems before they impact the business.

The combined SCADA/MES system was installed by Silchester and Citect with no loss of production or downtime. Immediate savings were found by Ryvita production teams as the bottleneck problems were targeted and rectified. Manual entry that took many hours per week to accomplish was reduced to just a few short minutes per shift. Moreover the accuracy of the data input is now unquestioned, and repeatability is sustainable.

The installation means that shift-team meetings can now project trends and real-time reports to their teams to show problems and identify best practices. Furthermore, as each new report becomes openly available the teams and production managers can readily 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 minimal time-to-fix culture for engineering teams.

The reports provided by Ampla are available network-wide, the very moment the record entries are completed, using only Microsoft Internet Explorer. Slice & dice reporting of shift/product/line/machine/day data can be achieved using both the Citect Ampla Analyst and the Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence Reporting Studio.

Custom tabular, pareto, trend, pie charts and reports are available, customised per user in clearly understandable dashboards, and linkable to Microsoft Dynamics NAV data, added Citect. Importantly, it noted, the technology and data transport of this Production Management System is hidden to the end user, who only needs straightforward, timely information in order to make business decisions in a timely manner.