The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation Its All About Productivity

A White Paper

Entivity, Inc. Ann Arbor, MI 48108

This paper will discuss the productivity factor within the smart factory, and how PC-based control users are able to drive productivity across the entire automation system. PC-based control users are gaining competitive advantages which dramatically affect the time it takes to get a new system to market, lower the control system design costs, and increase the up-time of equipment. Lets face it. Its not getting any easier out there. The macro-economic world has changed considerably from the early 1970s to today, as we face the turn of the century. In the 70s and early 80s, inefficiencies in manufacturing could be more easily hidden by price increases attributed to inflation. Today, were seeing mergers and acquisitions all around us, resulting in more and more economic buying power moving into fewer and fewer hands. Price increases in manufactured products are not only unacceptable, but can result in a significant loss of business and customers. Suppliers are being forced to sign contracts with their customers that guarantee annual price decreases every year for five years. Across the board, manufacturers are being driven to cut prices to their customers. If you cant do it, there is a competitor somewhere in the world ready to take away your business at a lower price. Inefficiencies across the board are brutally punished in the market place. Manufacturers

must find ways to continually cut costs or face downsizing and perhaps the closing of their organization. As a result, manufacturers are driving out inefficiencies across the entire supply chain. They are examining every aspect of their business, from the point of supply to the delivery and installation to the customers end product. Investments are being made in systems that drive higher levels of productivity in the supply chain, production scheduling and planning, and production data collection. OEM Equipment manufacturers and system integrators are also being driven to become more efficient. Equipment suppliers and integrators are finding themselves more frequently facing fixed price, turnkey projects - with very few ways to differentiate their offerings. Competitors are buying the same hardware at similar discounts. Engineering costs are increasing at a rapid rate, and OEMs are finding themselves more frequently in the high risk, low reward business. Time-to-market also remains a critical factor in the success of a new product launch. Its often said that the first 6 months in any new product release represents up to 50% of a new products total profit contributions to the corporation. With all of these pressures, manufacturers and OEMs alike are asking: How can we increase our manufacturing productivity? As they ask these questions, they are finding their traditional
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The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation: Its All About Productivity

legacy control systems, based on 30-year-old PLC technology, are the bottleneck to improving their manufacturing productivity. The Manufacturing Hierarchy In the traditional view of the manufacturing system hierarchy shown in Figure 1, enterprise & supply chain management have been the key focus of the ERP systems that sit at the top of the hierarchy. These systems provide a financial and management view into the operations, suppliers, and customers. The goal of these systems is to provide the tools to optimize the financial returns to the corporation and manage the supply chain activity as efficiently as possible.

fires to fight at other layers in the model. But as money has been invested to drive better supply chain management and better production planning systems, improving the automation efficiency has gained the attention of many manufacturing executives. To understand why, lets take a look at the manufacturing hierarchy from the perspective of information and product flow. Through the systems over time, we see how the functions of the manufacturing hierarchy play together in a sequence of delivering product to the customer (see Figure 2.)

Supply Chain Efficiency

ERP MES Automation

Enterprise & Supply Chain Management Manufacturing Scheduling & Planning Manufacturing Automation
ERP MES

Internal Scheduling Efficiency Production Efficiency

Automation MES ERP

Figure 2. Product and Information Flow through the Manufacturing Systems

Figure 1. The Manufacturing System Hierarchy

Production planning and scheduling has been the key focus of the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) which represent the next layer down. MES systems provide the tools to optimize the use of internal manufacturing assets by effectively planning and scheduling the manufacturing operations. At the bottom of the hierarchy is the automation system - responsible for machine control, production automation, and equipment efficiency (machine uptime). Until 5 years ago, little attention had been paid to improving the legacy automation systems. There were enough

The manufacturing organization is bracketed with the supply chain management tools, to manage the relationships and product flow between the manufacturer and its suppliers and customers. The next layer represents the MES layer which manages the internal scheduling efficiencies up front, to optimize the use of an organizations production assets to meet production schedules and provide the greatest ROI. On the back side, the MES system gathers production data, compares it against expectations, and adjusts the scheduling and planning to assure the customer requirements for volume, delivery, and quality are being met.
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The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation: Its All About Productivity

Automation sits right smack in the middle of the product and information flow model. End-to-end delivery is dramatically affected by the efficiency of the automation infrastructure. The ability to deliver product efficiently and share production information with the rest of the enterprise is directly dependent on the automation infrastructure. In many cases, however, the automation system is based on 30year-old legacy technology. This technology is neither productive nor efficient. The Automation Infrastructure The legacy automation infrastructure used by many manufacturers and OEMs is based on the Programmable Logic Controller or PLC. PLCs were developed in the late 1960s to replace relay-based automation systems. Early in their existence, these microprocessor-based hardware platforms were sold as solid state controllers to alleviate the fears of using computers on the factory floor and keep the MIS department out of the production environment. While the PLC was an excellent tool in the 1970s and 1980s for replacing relay-based automation systems, it wasnt designed with the automation requirements of the 1990s in mind. The traditional programming language used for PLCs (called relay ladder logic) is a drawing of electrical circuit diagrams that emulate the relay circuits used to control machines in the 1950s and 1960s. While PLC-based ladder logic programming does a great job emulating the technology of the 1950s, PLC designers never

anticipated the need to interface to more advanced automation systems. Todays systems require a whole new level of automation and interface into equipment and tools that simply werent available even 5 years ago. They can take advantage of a new automation infrastructure that can drive productivity, and increase return on manufacturing assets.

ERP

MES

PLC-based Automation

MES

ERP

PC-based Automation

Figure 3. PC-based Control Drives Automation Productivity

These include automation systems that must integrate motion control to manipulate or move parts in production, vision inspection systems to assure quality, as well as bar code and RF tag readers to identify and track components for quality and historical reasons. Many of todays automation systems require graphical displays to interact with operators, serial port interfaces into an interface to smart devices, or network interfaces to smart I/O devices that can describe themselves, and diagnose themselves as fault conditions occur. Manufacturers have found operator-level diagnostics can deliver a higher return on assets by telling the operator how to recover the

The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation: Its All About Productivity

machine and get the equipment back into production as quickly as possible to keep production running. Todays automation systems require functions that PLCs perform with great difficulty. PLCbased systems incur high programming expense, deliver poor flexibility and inhibit an environment for continuous process improvement. PLCs once promoted as the core of islands of automation are now considered barriers to the information required in today's smart factory. Data connectivity requirements across the enterprise demand that manufacturers look for other solutions. The Next Generation Automation Infrastructure: PC-based Control PC-based control directly addresses todays automation system requirements. The smart factory can take advantage of an entirely new automation infrastructure, and gain a whole new level of manufacturing productivity. By leveraging the economies of scale from the $200 billion PC industry and focusing on productivity, amazing results have been achieved by both OEM equipment providers and manufacturers. PC-based control consolidates into a single platform with a single database, replacing what had previously been accomplished with up to 5 separate PLC system components and 5 different databases. This eliminates significant hardware costs ad the configuration workload required to design automation systems. The PC becomes

the hub of the smart factory, tying all control components into a single platform as shown in Figure 4.

Cell Control PC

Operator Station Programming PC

Steeplechase
PC-based Controller
32 passed 0 failed testing widgets

PLC
32 passed 0 failed testing widgets

Motion Controller

Input/Output Modules

Figure 4. PC-based Control Integrates Multiple PLC Components into a Single PC.

With PC-based control and the advances made in graphical programming languages the productivity and efficiency of the automation infrastructure has been dramatically enhanced. Flow Chart Programming PC-based control is far more than emulating a PLC on a PC. When given a tool set which includes both traditional ladder logic and flow chart programming tools, over 90% of users design their systems with flow chart programming. Why? Flow chart programming goes well beyond the boundaries of ladder logic. It allows the user to focus on the process. More powerful design and maintenance tools speed development, provide self-documenting programs, and automate the development of operator level diagnostics. The end result: users leveraging PC-based control with flow chart programming are cutting
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The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation: Its All About Productivity

their design times by 50 to 75%, cutting their times to market by 50%, and impacting equipment downtime anywhere from 10 to 90% depending on their process. Flow charts offer a unifying approach to automation programming and integrate the entire range of automation functions into a single programming environment that is easy to use and understand. Flow charts can integrate functions such as motion control, bar code and RF identification, vision systems, operator interface and robot control into a single programming environment as shown in Figure 5.

Operator Level Diagnostics The Key to Increasing Uptime Because most manufacturing equipment involves some form of mechanical operations, faults, jams, and failures are inevitable. One key to lowering the equipment downtime is to lower the overall MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) by quickly diagnosing, repairing and restarting a faulted piece of equipment as fast as possible. The faster a piece of equipment can be recovered, the lower the downtime, and by definition the higher the utilization capacity and return on assets (ROA) on any given piece of equipment. Operator level diagnostics are extremely

I/O I/O

Smart I/O Smart I/O

difficult and expensive to design with PLC ladder logic and are almost impossible to keep up to date as the system changes. With diagnostic management tools available with flow chart programming, engineers can quickly design machine diagnostics. Diagnostics can be built into the control program to automatically diagnose equipment faults and provide the operator with repair, recovery, and restart instructions through HTML-based graphical instructions. Machine diagnostics become as easy as 1, 2, and 3: 1. Take digital pictures of the recovery process. 2. Create HTML pages linking digital pictures and operator recovery instructions into a logic fault recovery

Motion Motion
Diagnostics Diagnostics

RF Tags RF Tags

Vision Vision
Robot Robot
Data Data

Bar Code Bar Code

OIT OIT

Connectivity Connectivity

Figure 5. Flowcharts Unify the Functions of an Automation System

Interfaces to smart I/O can pull diagnostic information from sensors, actuators, or other intelligent devices by simply adding a single block to the flow chart. Complex data handling such as sorting algorithms, which could take weeks to program in a PLC ladder logic, become simple and straight forward with flow chart programming and can be programmed in hours.

The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation: Its All About Productivity

sequence using off-the-shelf tools such as Microsofts PowerPoint.

IT IT Manager Manager

Process Mechanical Control Control Process Mechanical Electrician Mechanic Engineer Engineer Engineer Engineer Electrician Mechanic Engineer Engineer

Operator Operator

Ladder Logic

3. Link the HTML file through a Diagnostic Wizard inside the flow chart. When an error occurs on the machine or during the process, the operator is immediately informed of the fault, and provided with graphical fault recovery tools to bring the machine on-line as quickly as possible. An example fault recovery screen is shown in Figure 6.

Flow Chart Programming

Figure 7. Flow Chart Programming crosses a number of Functional Boundaries

Where traditional PLC ladder logic is understood by the controls engineer and the electrician, the upstream IT manager, process engineer, and mechanical engineers are rarely able understand the cryptic circuit diagram programming. Down stream, neither the mechanical skilled tradesman nor the operator can understand the operation though ladder logic. If the truth is known, rarely can the controls engineer or electrician reconstruct a high level view of the actual machine operation through ladder logic. Flow charts cross the traditional functional boundaries of a manufacturing organization because they have the ability to be easily understood by all. With the tools to easily access data locally and remotely over the network through the Microsoft DNA architecture, access to production data can now be easily handled by an organizations IT group. A number of OEMs mechanical and process engineers are using flow chart programming tools to specify the system design and sequence of operations. Once the sequence of operations is defined, the flow chart outline of the process is turned over to the controls engineer to fill out the control logic details.

Figure 6 Diagnostic Tools Provide Operator Repair and Recovery Instructions

Crossing Organizational Boundaries to Improve the Process Another driver behind the rapid adoption of flow chart programming is the capability to cross organizational boundaries. Beyond the controls engineers and electricians, flow charts are also easily understood by IT managers, process engineers, mechanical engineers, right down to the operator.

The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation: Its All About Productivity

Flow chart programming also provides the capability for the mechanical and process engineers and skilled tradesmen to understand exactly how the machine or process is being controlled. A self-documenting set of flow charts can be as intuitive to read as a graphical trouble-shooting guide. Mechanical and electrical technicians are able to easily maintain and troubleshoot a failed machine by monitoring flow charts which are highlighted step-by-step as the machine executes. Flow chart programming users also achieve an unexpected benefit: the tools to continuously improve their process. Flow charts graphically document the automation process and make it easy to understand. This allows manufacturing and controls engineers to shift their focus from integrating multiple legacy controllers, multiple databases and complex programming tools, to focus on improving the manufacturing process, cutting cycle times, and improving equipment throughput. Its All About Productivity. Cutting design times, launch time and time to market, and reducing equipment downtime - all lead to higher profitability and a competitive advantage in the market place. PC-based control has quickly been adopted by mainstream manufacturers and OEM machine builders across the board. Consider the results seen by the following users:

ABB Industrial Systems retrofitted a legacy control system for cigarette assembly machines with PC-based control and flow chart programming. The end result: they cut their system design time from 72 man-months of engineering time to 14 man-months and 80% savings in engineering design costs, cut their time to market from 2 years to 7 months - a 66% reduction, and increased uptime by an additional 33%. DaimlerChrysler cut the launch time on a new transmission assembly line from 360 days for their best ever PLC installation to 30 days for their first major installation of PC-based control using flow chart programming. The equipment itself was delivered to DaimlerChrysler 13 weeks ahead of an equivalent PLC-based line (see Figure 8.)

Figure 8. DaimlerChrysler 70-Node PC-based Control Transmission Assembly Line

Honda of America cut the average machine recovery time from 20 minutes using traditional PLC systems to less than 2 minutes by leveraging the strength of diagnostics with flow chart programming.

The Next Generation of Manufacturing Automation: Its All About Productivity

Alvey Inc. reduced system design time by 50% on their PC-based gantry robot palletizer equipment, compared to a previous PLC design. At the same time, they were able to incorporate user-level diagnostics that were not possible in a PLC system. General Motors, working together with EDS, leveraged the enterprise-wide data connectivity to drive set up time from an average of 45 minutes down to 10 minutes with a one-button changeover, where recipe information is directly downloaded from the MIS system (see Figure 9.)

environment. Manufacturers, OEMs, and system integrators are all leveraging next generation PC-based control tools with flow chart programming to get a higher level of productivity from their automation systems. By cutting their design costs time to market, and equipment downtime, and gaining access to realtime production data, they have been able to develop higher levels of efficiencies in manufacturing that could not be achieved with their legacy control systems.

Figure 9. Information directly downloaded from the MIS System at a GM Installation

Ingersoll-Rands Johnstone Pump Division abandoned four months of effort attempting to design a system with traditional IEC-1131 based PLC tools, and redesigned the entire control system in 4 weeks using flow chart programming tools. At the same time, Johnstone Pump was able to develop a key differentiating feature with built-in diagnostics on all of their standard equipment. Automation can once again be a key competitive weapon in the rapidly changing manufacturing
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