Challenges & Solutions for Aerospace Leader
About the Customer
The customer is one of the most recognized names in Aerospace & Defense Manufacturing. The American multinational corporation designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles worldwide.
Project Summary
Engineering Industries eXcellence’s experts worked with Siemens and the customer to provide the critical Manufacturing Execution System (MES) technical expertise and skills required to support the heavy automation of their complex fuselage build process in a highly integrated and data-rich environment.
Project Activities
The main activies delivered by Engineering's Industries eXcellence team included:
- Supporting the complex design and implementation of the integration between Siemens Opcenter Execution (SIMATIC IT) MES and PLC-driven automation systems
- Developing a custom web portal to reduce overhead related to MES system use and increase overall levels of data transparency
- Leading full system integration testing between MES software and automation systems
- Providing extensive, on-site system support, user training and documentation for the new IT infrastructure
The Customer's Need
Brought in as one of the leading practices for Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) in the world, Engineering joined a world-class team of experts to help the customer transform and digitalize the highly complex manufacturing process of their aerospace fuselages. The customer's main business drivers were:
- Reducing time-to-market
- Reducing potential for costly rework
- Reducing costs related to production
- Improving employee health by automating repetitive, strenuous tasks
- Improving data collection capability
- Improving insight into existing production process
- Reducing dependency on human operators
- Ensuring government compliance and quality standards
About the Solution
Based on an implementation of a Siemens Opcenter Execution (SIMATIC IT) MES, the fully integrated solution our team delivered to the aerospace leader consisted of a huge number of moving parts:
- A customized user-facing web portal that sits on top of the MES. This web portal is the way in which users interact with the entire system. From here, users can create orders, send work instructions to individual pieces of equipment, view data returned during work executions, etc.
- When a user creates an order, the MES translates the order parameters into a form easily understood by the various pieces of equipment involved in the process. This translation is then passed to the Plant Coordinator, a Siemens PLC that acts as the "communication brain” of the entire process.
- The Plant Coordinator passes the instructions on to the PLC that controls the individual piece of equipment needed to execute the action. Eventually, the equipment receives the instruction and starts to perform the work specified.
While this seems like a fairly simple workflow, you must consider that in many cases, multiple instructions are being passed around at any given time. This IT ecosystem must keep track of what is happening within the process at all times to ensure that there are no crashes or other detrimental effects to performing work instructions. This involves a detailed understanding of where equipment currently is, what it might look like if a work instruction is executed, and how all of this fits into the overall process.
Engineering's Advantage
Why was Engineering chosen as the best partner and system integrator to support this global aerospace leader’s ambitious digital initiative? Our consultants have a unique skillset that brings together the power of Opcenter Execution (SIMATIC IT) with the simplicity and usability of web-based programming, which allowed us to produce a system that is both able to perform complex logic and make it as simple as possible for the end user. Thanks to our global capabilities and resources, we also had the flexibility to have consultants on-site for implementation and testing purposes. Thanks to the solution delivered by our team, the customer is now one exciting step closer to lights-out manufacturing - a seamlessly automated and fully transparent manufacturing process from beginning to end.
