RECENT PROJECTS
We see ourselves as a business in the Industrial IT-OT space with tool-sets that can improve efficiencies of business operations by reducing unplanned stoppages, providing greater transparency and empowering businesses to make data driven decisions. Our project lists are growing. Some recent ones are given below.
Digital Transformation
The business is a part of a large global corporation and it embarked on a journey towards digital transformation as part of it continuous improvement strategy. As part of this initiative, they had the following objectives:
- Migrate from paper based product defect recording to fully automated web and mobile based platform that could be used to record defects which could then be analysed using Power BI.
- Capture all process alarms and events and determine the root causes for line stoppages and loss of productivity.
- Establish a real-time platform that shows Asset Uptimes and also allows the Operations Managers benchmark typical repair times when a line has to be repaired.
- Provide Forklift operators with a real-time dashboard that shows where the finished goods are waiting for goods receipt. Once receipted in SAP, that information was then fed back to determine, how much time it took to perform a goods receipt once the product was generated.
- Establish a data platform that enables them to view in near real-time people movement through various access points within the premises.
- Acquire and present the plant wide energy consumption and utilisation data.
The project was delivered to the full satisfaction of the client and has now been adopted as their 'source of truth' for taking business decisions.
Martin Ruiz who led the project from the client's side had this to say:
SP Software & Automation P/L has provided an amazing support to our 24x7 business operation by developing the business Data Platform, supporting values such as continuous improvement, operation excellence and root/cause analysis. - “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” and this is what SP Software & Automation has helped us to achieve.
Upgrade of Plant Historian
MM Kembla is the largest manufacturer of copper tubes in Australia while SAPUTO ( Warrnambool Cheese & Butter Plant) is a large integrated dairy producer. The common thread both these manufacturing giants share is in using GE Digital's Proficy Enterprise Historian as their Operational Data Platform. When it came to upgrading these Historians, there were several challenges:
- These were running plants and data loss could not be allowed as their manufacturing decisions and batch recording and reporting depend on the Historian being available.
- Following migration, past data also needed to be migrated and in MM Kembla's case the new Historian had to be integrated to their old SCADA system.
Both projects were delivered on time and on-budget without any loss of data during the migration process.
Intelligent Water Operations
A large Victorian country utility wanted to implement an intelligent water network operations system which will enable them to perform 'water balance' in real-time, give them the ability to generate reports related to water production and billed consumption and wastages to the regulatory authorities as well as perform several compliance reporting and analytics. Before, this initiative, they were recording information manually in Excel from data captured in SCADA and the billing system. It required several experts at least 7-10 days to generate a full water balance and Consumption Model for the entire network. Several times during the years this had to be done. With the implementation of the software, the entire network is now online and reports and dashboards are available at the click of a button.