Leveraging Data Collection for Plant Floor Automation

by: Jason Biwer, Market Development Manager

Plant floors can gain increased visibility from data collection techniques

Our society is becoming increasingly reliant on the massive amounts of data that surround us every day. The ability to collect, analyze, and display this data on a personal level is one of the highlights of current consumer electronics product offerings. The widespread adoption of these tools has highlighted the shortcomings of historically common methods of collecting and analyzing data in the industrial marketplace.

Simply implementing a more direct connection between business layers in an organization can lead to reduced downtime, increased productivity, and greater profitability. Some benefits to data collection are:

1. Prevention of production issues
Since data is collected in real time, you have the ability to quickly identify production issues. This is one of the largest benefits to a good data collection system as it reduces the cost of waste in the production process.

2. Increased visibility
The cost of slow-moving inventory is one of the largest problems within any production organization. Increased visibility from the plant floor can assist with streamlining the purchasing cycle and optimizing the flow of materials through an organization.

3. Targeted maintenance
Preventative maintenance is one of the key ways to reduce machine downtime. Collecting and visualizing data from machine components and operations can help proactively identify problems without the pain and high cost of downtime.

4. Increased business insights
Increased plant floor visibility can help drive business decisions and assisting management with improving profitability.

Before the introduction of plant floor controllers, data was collected by hand. Although the most straightforward method, misinterpretation and mishandling of data resulted in frequent corruption. As PCs became more prevalent, Microsoft introduced Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), which allowed Windows programs to communicate with each other. DDE was often used to connect an Excel workbook to a controller on the plant floor to collect data. However, this is not an efficient option for real-time data collection.

Many data collection products will store data to a Comma Separated Variable (CSV) file, which typically has low implementation costs, but it requires users to mine the data from the file and organize it into a readable format. Unfortunately, maintaining the large quantity of CSV files generated with these systems often becomes cumbersome, thereby compromising the integrity of the data itself.

The backbone of many modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are relational databases such as SQL or Oracle. These databases not only organize data, but they also offer the ability to retrieve application specific data using queries.

Connecting manufacturing and enterprise layers within a facility requires a custom application running on a PC on the plant floor. However, the inherent instability of plant floor PCs make this solution costly and unreliable. Most PCs are simply not designed for the harsh manufacturing environments and are susceptible to viruses and constant OS updates, making the maintenance of these applications quite challenging.

Connecting the plant floor directly to the business layer of an organization can seem daunting; however, manufacturers of plant floor controllers are beginning to create solutions that enable users to leverage the benefits of a relational database. Updating your company’s data collection methods can lead to improvements in your processes without incurring the vast capital expenses of installing new equipment resulting in an attractive ROI.