Message in a bottle
22 Apr 2014
New SCADA system boosts operational intelligence at APPE.
APPE, a leading manufacturer of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) preforms, bottles and containers in the UK, needed to increase its competitive edge.
It decided the best way to achieve this would be to create the backbone for an Operational Intelligence capability. After investigating the options available, APPE decided to invest in a SCADA-based IT system.
APPE supplies some of the biggest household brands and has a presence in a wide range of markets, such as food, beverages, household and personal care.
Prior to the global recession APPE began to focus heavily on improving its operational strategy.
Its main aim was to make improvements to the overall visibility of its production process.
Key to this strategy was to implement a system that captured plant data, and enabled it to visualise and therefore understand what was driving plant performance, says Tim Manuel, continuous improvement champion at APPE.
“In a high productivity, automated plant such as ours, access to high resolution data is essential for validating performance, troubleshooting and root cause analysis to avoid failures and downtime, and to understand and remove the causes for production losses,” says Manuel.
“However, the sheer volume and complexity of our data, and the speed at which it was created, was too great for our existing IT systems to handle,” he says.
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