American Food Giant
Machine connectivity with dataFEED OPC Suite for global digital factory project at 150+ locations
Background
- Renowned American multinational food giant specializing in confectionary, food and beverage products
- Plant operations in more than 150 locations globally
- Four IoT applications defined at project start, mix of on-prem and cloud-based deployment (for eg., comparability of product sites and identification of weak performers)
Business need
- Cloud-based solutions shall be deployed whenever possible (reduced CAPEX)
- Future-proof architecture, customer plans to add more applications and to migrate on-premise solutions to cloud with same components for machine connectivity
Technical Requirements
- Heterogenous brownfield: Mix of Siemens-, Rockwell- and other PLCs
- Use OPC UA standard to interface with software applications
- Deploy machine connectivity on standardized rack system, to be rolled-out at all locations
- Softing dataFEED OPC Suite and OPC Tunnel used to acquire data from PLCs
- Connecting Shoplogix OEE application running on AWS, Schneider application for energy management and Infinity QS for quality management
- Connectivity with package labelling application planned (production critical process requiring SLA, under discussion)
- Pre-assembly of rack system with dataFEED and other components by third party system integrators
- Cost-efficiency (same machine connectivity shared across multiple applications, shared across all locations)
- Future proof architecture based on standards
- Easy to use for shopfloor personnel
- No changes to automation network or PLC
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Softing Industrial
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