Our customer is global leader in the distribution, resale and compounding of commodity, engineering and specialty plastic and rubber polymers on behalf of petrochemical, construction and plastics industries.
Objective
We were requested to support a MES integration issue for 15 production plants in Europe. Two MES projects had already been started: one Wonderware project and a GE Proficy project. These MES solutions have been delivered with varying degrees of success. No integration with ERP has been included in the GE Proficy project. The Wonderware solution is fully integrated, but here the ERP system will be replaced by the company’s standard.
The main challenge was to keep the current MES systems running and integrate with the company’s ERP/IMS system, which is heavily under development. We also needed to deal with the factories that do not yet have a MES solution. The Wonderware implementation has been well executed and a high degree of automation has been achieved. In the GE implementation, ERP integration had no focus and this means that a solution had to be found. In addition, there are 13 factories, out of 15, without a MES solution in place.
Approach
Our approach was based on the ISA95 automation integration model and had both implementations positioned in it. From here a MES concept has been developed that provides a situation for factories both with and without MES. In the plants with a MES solution, an ISA95 based interface with ERP will be developed. The non-MES plants are, depending on the complexity, provided with the Wonderware solution, or with a company standard (light) MES version yet to be developed.
Results
The extensive MES integration project is in the engineering phase at the time of writing this document and the concept was tested with positive result in various workshops in the European factories.
“The MES concept is tested in workshops on diverse processes in multiple European factories.”
Mario van Cann