PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CENTERLINING: SET POINT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIAL TO STAYING IN THE GAME

PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CENTERLINING: SET POINT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIAL TO STAYING IN THE GAME

CENTERLINING: SET POINT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIAL TO STAYING IN THE GAME

CENTERLINING Centerlining: Set Point Management Essential to Staying in the Game All continuous process industries, whether processing chemical, treating waste water, generating and distributing electricity, or blending feed steams for plastic extrusions, are faced with ensuring that lines run at optimal speed while attempting to predict alarms to avoid unplanned downtime events. These challenges also apply to operations with automated web-handling processes where control engineers and operators are optimizing speed while avoiding costly web breaks. This intertwining of machines in web-handling and other hybrid industries, sometimes at varying levels of technology and capability, is highly complex and demanding. Manufacturing converting operations with web-handling processes typically run at very high speeds. Web breaks are costly events, which contribute significantly to the manufacturing operating expense (MOE) and affect customer delivery commitments. Proper management of operational set points is essential to reducing downtime while maintaining accurate line control. This paper examines the value of the operations historian to enable a centerlining application with essential information used to optimize machine control and minimize machine downtime. Introduction In the mature commodity roll and converting industry, companies face the multiheaded challenge of meeting the demand of their customers for consistent high quality, dependable on-time service, and competitive pricing. Companies not meeting this demand find their customers taking their business elsewhere. You either have it or you don t. Demonstrating the having it ability consistently builds customer loyalty an imperative in a commodity business. Conversely, roll and converting companies find it difficult to be competitive without demonstrating an ability to be flexible, reliable, and valuable to the often-changing demands of their customers. Companies in the roll and converting industry that have core competencies in their manufacturing operations consistently meet (or beat) these demands. They have an uncanny knowledge and, yes, feel for their manufacturing capabilities. These best-in-class companies invest in the skill, infrastructure, methods, and information to characterize and analyze what can and cannot be promised and delivered to their customers and shareholders. More importantly, they are also keenly aware of what steps are necessary to get and stay agile, and with some innovation, they quickly become The Game Changers. In the roll and converting industry, centerlining the manufacturing process can prove to be a sacred grail to understanding machine and process capability. Centerlining is a collaborative process typically used in the pulp and paper industry that identifies and optimizes key performance indicators (KPIs) within a production line. The increasing cost of energy, raw material, and equipment will have a direct impact on the MOE and pricing strategy of a commodity business. Because profit margins are often mature in a commodity business, controlling the company s operating cost is paramount to staying in The Game. Centerlining helps a company rationalize MOE as a KPI where process improvement opportunities can be identified to lean out machine utilization accounting for operating the production line asset(s) only when necessary, using standard work 1

PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT operations and functions. Such improvements will yield lower costs for both energy and maintenance. Ideally, wear and tear on machine assets will decrease, yielding higher mechanical stability and less unplanned downtime due to mechanical failures. Centerlining enables a company to justify the cost of poor quality (COPQ) as a KPI. As an example, COPQ scorecard analysis can be shared with raw material vendors. The analysis measures the vendor s quality performance as it relates to the overall process and product quality of finished goods. This is powerful information that can assist a company s purchasing department with contract negotiations. And cost savings in energy, maintenance, and material combined with higher machine utilization and throughput help to increase a company s earnings and shareholder value. Centerlining facilitates the following process control requirements that these companies demand: Establishing optimal machine set points Allowing efficient utilization through product/equipment changeovers Reducing unplanned downtime Minimizing material waste due to web breaks Centerlining focuses operations on the pursuit of process perfection and away from the mindset of the perfect product. Additionally, centerlining can provide statistics for production and process improvement initiatives like Lean, Six Sigma, and theory-of-constraints (TOC) in an automated web-handling environment. These applications contribute to improved overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and Utilization of Essential Equipment (UEE) through proactive/preventive scheduled machine maintenance. Centerlining requires input from multiple data sources, including historical and real-time process variables from control and drive systems. So how does a data historian provide the requisite capabilities for the next generation data historians (operations management - OM) and plant-level architectures that are now available to manufacturers? FactoryTalk Historian Site Edition is a next generation data historian from Rockwell Automation that provides effective data collection through run charting and improvement analysis. Let s explore how to meet and exceed data requirements through use of this valuable and effective tool for centerlining manufacturing processes in the roll and converting industries. Centerlining: Build Process Knowledge Base In roll and converting companies that are driven to perfection, work order execution on optimized production lines are tuned to run the same way every time. The goal is to attain production that is on-specification and exceeds customer expectations while having on-target forecasted material waste, operating cost, and no unplanned machine downtime. The reality is in the best-run roll and converting companies, operations execution is centered on a principle of discipline throughout the organization to proactively seek out, monitor and prevent those KPIs from wavering out of control limits. Centerlining focuses operations on the pursuit of process perfection and away from the mindset of the perfect product. In principle, diligently managing the company s manufacturing processes to be centerlined near or at perfect will yield high quality, minimize scrap material, and improve OEE. 2

CENTERLINING Process perfection starts with disseminating knowledge of KPIs and the characteristics that comprise them throughout the entire manufacturing process. The centerlining process begins with diagramming each manufacturing process and illustrating the critical components, steps and points of adjustment in each process. Design of experiments (DOEs) and Run Charting are commonly used engineering tools that facilitate the understanding of the manufacturing process and its characteristics (that is, the variables defined in the processes). FactoryTalk Historian SE provides the infrastructure and an easy-to-configure, integrated toolset that collects real-time process data from PLCs, SCADA, drive, and control systems and then aggregates the data into KPIs. FactoryTalk Historian SE Trending and Visualization for Centerlining Applications FactoryTalk View Integration Native Trending in FactoryTalk View FactoryTalk Historian ProcessBook Runtime Analytics for Alarms, Events and KPI Constructions ProcessBook as Authoring Tool for FactoryTalk View ProcessBook add-in Other Advanced Clients Such as FactoryTalk BatchView Event Framing FactoryTalk Batch Events Centerlining: Improve Your Process In roll and converting, automated web-handling typically involves threading material through intricate web paths. Effective centerlining allows for pre-setting set points and machine registers for process control. In a web-break event, set point management is critical to fast changeover techniques. If a web-handling process experiences frequent web breaks, then downtime and scrap material increases. In some cases, these incidents are attributed to needing a required calibration of the machine to OEM spec. In other cases, statistical analysis of the 3

PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT manufacturing process is required (machine, material, and human; machine specification vs. run specification, as well as controlled and uncontrolled components). During the triage for frequent downtime reasons, it is sometimes necessary to consider that your production processes justifiably vary (through process adjustments) from the machine s original spec as it relates to your customers tolerance level for quality. Visibility into the performance of the manufacturing process is prerequisite to improvement. KPIs reflect the critical performance factors of the machine and critical-to-quality (CTQs) characteristics of operations. Even more important, KPIs provide the visibility necessary to recognize a developing problem and take the appropriate corrective actions while those actions can still have a positive impact. KPIs are composite values. By this, we mean that KPIs are typically a calculated analytic they aren t just simple trends. KPIs generally combine data from disparate sources. OEE, for example, is calculated from three other KPIs: availability, performance and quality metrics that are independently collected and directly correlated to index of a centerlined operation. These primary KPIs are used by many manufacturers as level one root cause metrics to identify the next set of analytics for investigation for a corrective action. They are calculated, alarmed, and updated constantly, in step with continuous operations as leading indicators of whether or not the performance targets will be achieved under current operating conditions. Advanced applications direct the metrics, associated alarms and prescribed corrective action to the role or expeditor most qualified and available during each shift. In more advance applications, these systems track the alarm and corrective action, then track the period to acknowledgement. And lastly, if not acknowledged, the incident is escalated and alarmed to the next level. This transformation of real-time production data into actionable information is analogous to business intelligence, but for the realtime, non-steady-state environment of manufacturing. Real-time data historians aggregate data from a wide variety of disparate sources, offering an ideal vehicle for gathering the data needed to calculate KPIs. In addition, real-time OM data historians are configured not only to perform KPI calculations, they can be configured to detect out of threshold events and generate alarms to notify operators and supervisors that remedial actions are needed now! For example, the real-time operations management (OM) historian can be configured to determine when the coatings of adhesive and silicone across Post-It Notes material begins to trend outside the product s upper or lower quality specification limits, triggering an alarm and work order operation to the machine s operator to take corrective action. FactoryTalk Historian SE provides the ability to capture real-time set point adjustments and allow the operator to contextualize the event during the production run correlating before and after process variable set point variances with product quality. This feature offers the ability to gain powerful intelligence about process and production performance essential to the pursuit of process perfection centerlining. 4

CENTERLINING Centerlining: Optimize Your Process Optimizing your process entails more than improving and controlling the mechanical aspects. It also involves consideration for improving the skill, standard operating procedures, and tendencies of the crews in the plants. Optimized centerlining, by definition, is a continuous, collaborative process improvement effort requiring cooperation, input, ownership and discipline from various personnel (product managers, process engineers, control engineers, operators, mechanics, electrical engineers, quality and IT). Consider the agility, flexibility, and can-do that develops in your organization as a result of tangible, realized benefit yielded from an optimized, centerlined manufacturing process. You gain the ability to differentiate your business capabilities from those of competitors by having a true sense of what and how your operation has met (or beaten) the demands of your customers. Additional benefits of centerlining and its positive team dynamics are 1) a direct effect in reducing material cost due to less waste from bad product, additional startup losses and additional stoppage losses, 2) additional equipment wear and maintenance due to startup cycles, and 3) balancing of production to demand due to reduced stock buffering. FactoryTalk Batch Analysis Capabilities Not all centerlining applications are exclusively process heavy. There are other industries that have a batch process somewhere in the mix. Applications in the building materials, aggregate and materials contain a batching activity either inline or as a pre-processing activity (pre-weigh); how, in those industries, does this same historian work to fill out the centerlining application? Batch execution of recipes generates a series of discrete events that are aligned with the processing attributes either inline or downstream to create a train of process alignment. Keeping the batch and continuous systems separated does not help to achieve the centerlining objectives, so integration at the production model, detailed scheduling and route/recipe execution layer yields the highest capacity for proactive root cause analysis and production excellence. This can be realized in practice utilizing the FactoryTalk Batch add-ins for trending that allow the batch and continuous systems to be correlated in near real-time. This add-in senses and alarms on abnormal developing bottlenecks or starvation events based on ideal runs of previous similar products. The high value of an OM historian in converting industries is demonstrated by the ability to correlate process, production operations, and product quality data into various continuous improvement analyses. These types of root cause analyses are performed using the Calculation Engine and Analytics of FactoryTalk Historian SE, using several of the supplied capabilites: 5

PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT Calculation Engine Performance Equations Totalizers ACE Advanced Computing Engine A fundamental quality capability of real-time SQC alarming on the server includes standard SQC Charts to support and enable Analysis Framework for developing models for analysis Process Design and Development Tools Data Access for legacy data: ODBC, OLEDB These functional capabilities are shown in application in the following converting operations cases. Case 1: Consider the cost of time, material, and effort to recover from an unplanned downtime event due to a mechanical failure. By adding context to the event in the FactoryTalk Historian SE historian, the ability to trend durability of machine parts and plan for predictable maintenance based on performance fact becomes a strategic edge for the business. The cost to manage spare parts inventory is significantly reduced because you know when to expect a replacement. Predictive maintenance is scheduled proactively; minimizing the reactive maintenance events that occur without real-time visibility to machine efficiency and performance. Case 2: Centerlining is only able to make a consistent practice if shift performance improvements are gained by correlating production performance with a crew s resource specialties and operating procedures. The operating tendencies of how each crew operates the production line is necessary data to provide insight for identifying skills gaps and new or enhanced standard operating procedures (SOPs). Plant management tend to stagnant and lapse in training and SOPs maintenance for extended periods of time. These omissions and lapses often contribute to inconsistent centerlining. Best procedural practices are rarely reviewed or benchmarked and then modified to reflect the best practices of the best operators. 6

CENTERLINING Case 3: Consider the cost of poor raw material quality and its impact on the ability of your business to offer your customers competitive pricing schemes. Trending the performance of your suppliers material against the quality of your product and then your customers satisfaction index becomes valuable leverage in supplier purchase negotiations. Again, FactoryTalk Historian SE provides the information needed to collaborate with suppliers on raw material quality and pricing negotiations. Centerlining your process account s for your suppliers raw material quality index allowing your process and control engineers to preset machine set points (Recipe Management). Value of the OM Historian By making the most efficient use of manufacturing data, manufacturers are more productive with existing equipment, returning more money to the bottom line. To be successful in the future, all manufacturers MUST be more Efficient, be more Productive, and make more Money. Peggy Smedley Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Start Magazine The need to capture large volumes of time-series data for literally thousands of data points has been pervasive in the process industries for decades. That need was answered by applications called data historians. Today s data historian has a muchevolved role as the plant s OM middleware that aggregates process data and then delivers data in many forms to operations (and enterprise systems). Given the expanded role historians play and their new, advanced capabilities, they are better termed operation management historians since they enable event-driven operations workflows and near real-time root cause analysis for alarm and events and KPIs. According to AMR Research, Data historians originated as special-purpose data repositories for environments in which vast quantities of time-series or temporal data are acquired and stored at very high rates. Historians allow users to archive and retrieve years of data in a fraction of the time required for a conventional relational database. A historian today provides a data abstraction layer between the real-time process realm and the more ponderous world of the transaction-oriented business and financial systems [and] offers a platform for aggregating, consolidating, and recalibrating data from various systems in the production environment. Conclusion In a commodity industry like roll and converting, the Game Changers have the trust and confidence of truly knowing their core manufacturing competencies and operational capabilities. They ve gained their trust and confidence by successfully demonstrating a willingness to meet or beat their customers demand for consistent high quality, dependable on-time service, and competitive pricing. Pursuing process perfection through the continuous improvements of centerlining not only gets you in The Game but also positions you to be The Winner!! 7

FactoryTalk and Rockwell Automation are trademarks of Rockwell Automation, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Publication FTALK-WP009B-EN-E January 2010 Copyright 2010 Rockwell Automation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.