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Emerson Smart Wireless Network improves safety at Boise paper mill
- 10/21/08
Boise enhanced safety at its paper mill in St. Helens, Oregon, by using Smart Wireless products to monitor its eye wash and safety shower stations.
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Legacy Building Automation Integration
By Advantech
The S4 Group, a building automation software company, used a BACnet-N2 Router to bring information from electric power monitoring meters, building and network infrastructure equipment, and other devices into legacy Johnson Controls Metasys building automation systems.
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Building from Worker to the Queen
Automation World, September 2008
By Rob Spiegel
BP Pipelines of North America, in Forest City, Ill., decided to add leak detection to the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to monitor pipeline leakage. The challenge was to feed process data from the Sybase database to the leak detection system. Cogent Industrial Technologies used a OPC DataHub to make the connection.
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Amcor PET Packaging Streamlines Plant Operations with Kepware
By Kepware
Amcor, a maker of packaging solutions from corrugated board to blister packs and bottles, installed a KepwareEX server to connect Wonderware, Siemens, Allen Bradley and Apriso/SAP applications into a single network via OPC.
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Wonderware steels Nucor
South Africa Instrumentation & Control, May 2008
Nucor’s mill in Berkeley, South Carolina, updated the InTouch application already in place with Wonderware’s IndustrialSQL Server historian and Application Server.
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OPC Drives Overall Equipment Efficiency from 65% to 75%
By Thomas R. Cutler
"Supporting OPC creates great new opportunities for collecting data from production equipment in real time, performing statistical analysis on the data and then feeding information back to operators, engineers or to the equipment itself," says Byron Shetler, Chief Technology Officer for Hertzler.
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Linux to ControlLogix solution uses OPC
Control Engineering Europe, April 2008
At Task Force Tips, product orders are fulfilled by a robotic picker that moves among hundreds of parts bins on a 100-foot-long, multilevel picking line. TFT decided to overhaul the robot, using ControlLogix PACs, servo drives, and TOP Server OPC Server and the Cogent OPC DataHub from Software Toolbox.
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Even Better Than the Real Thing
Control Engineering Asia, April 2008
By Bob Erickson
OPC connectivity enables a legacy Honeywell DCS to take its rightful place as the cornerstone of a unified plant control structure.
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Solutia R&D Powered by OPC
By Matrikon
Solutia used a MatrikonOPC Server for the legacy Moore APACS to enable data interchange between APACS, OPC DA clients, and the process data historian (AspenTech’s InfoPlus.21).
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Wind Generators bring data together with MatrikonOPC
By Matrikon
AES Wind Power uses MatrikonOPC Desktop Historian and Operational Insight software for real-time and historical data access, thus eliminating multiple SCADA systems and making data universally available.
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Ahold Coffee selects Ampla to improve OEE on its production lines
SA Instrumentation & Control, February 2008
The Ahold Coffee Company selected Ampla, Citect's MES solution, which consisted of the Planner, Downtime, Production, and Metrics modules. Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a key indicator, and the company has already seen significant improvements in this KPI on selected lines since Ampla was installed.
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FlavourCraft standardises on Beckhoff Automation
SA Instrumentation & Control, February 2008
By Andrew Ashton
The Beckhoff choice allowed FlavourCraft the flexibility to build both small and large systems with the same components and programming languages. They use Beckhoff I/O, Profibus, OPC, PACs and PLCs.
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World's Largest Coca-Cola Plant Uses OPC DataHub
By Cogent Real Time Systems
Coca-Cola’s Ballina Beverages facility, recently installed the OPC DataHub from Cogent Real-Time Systems to log alarm data and create end-of-shift reports. The plant, located in Ballina, Ireland, sends alarm data from RSLinx to a OPC server, through the OPC hub, and to an Excel spreadsheet.
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Matrix Technologies upgrades process control system at steel mill with OPC
Matrix upgraded the control system at one of AK Steel’s mills. The computer had to communicate with A-B and Square D PLCs. The interface was accomplished with a MatrikonOPC Server.
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Ease of connection improves plant efficiency for Santee Cooper
OPC technology provides ease of access to the wide variety of devices in our enterprise, eliminating costly custom or proprietary interfaces. Providing us with a flexible and scalable solution we can build on for years to come. We are confident and secure in our ability to meet the 98% uptime emissions reporting requirements. Now that these manual processes are automated, we are saving approximately 4 hours of resource allocation in a 24 hour shift rotation.
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From Loading Bay to Enterprise with One System
Plains Marketing Canada recently implemented a Bulk Terminal System from ProSoft Technology resulting in unprecedented access to reliable product inventory availability and product movement forecasts, elimination of labor associated with manual data transfer and centralized management of the TMS database on a company-wide basis, resulting in a significant labor cost savings at truck loading facilities.
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Integrating Live Production Data with Business Applications
Propal Paper Production in Valle del Cauca, Colombia recently upgraded their plants as part of a strategy to enhance profitability, stay competitive and maximize their Return on Investment (ROI) in the demanding paper market. They used standards-based OPC industrial connectivity to provide a complete off-the-shelf solution to give them quick, reliable and secure access to highly accurate data.
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Maintaining Healthy IT Assets using OPC Technology
Over the past several years, there have been two significant trends in the industrial marketplace. First, control system vendors are using more Ethernet based communication networks and Microsoft operating systems. Second, many companies have an increased focus towards predictive or condition based maintenance. OPC plays an important role in both trends.
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OPC Enabled Real-Time Access to Remote Field Data
Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) produces 43% of Nigeria’s oil and is the pioneer and leader of Nigeria’s petroleum industry. Operating in the Niger Delta and adjoining shallow offshore areas, Shell has over 3,000 kilometers of pipelines, 87 flowstations, 8 gas plants and more than 1,000 wells.
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Global Operations Required Significant Changes
Managing energy costs is critical to the success of any industrial gas company. The highest operating cost incurred in air separation processes is the cost of electricity. This cost can be as high as two-thirds of the total cost of production, and plants that produce liquid products can potentially use tens of thousands of Kilowatts per hour. Model Predictive Control, or MPC technology has been maximizing process performance, improving efficiencies, reducing energy usage, raw material usage, and environmental impact in process industries for over 25 years.
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