DiVE FactoryTrend for Siemens MindSphere

Manufacturing plant floors today utilize a host of software systems and machines. The importance of monitoring production lines and gathering intelligent data from these assets is critical, but many are dealing with outdated, home-grown or ineffective software. Part of the DiVE Suite from Engineering designed for the collection and analyzation of production plant data, DiVE FactoryTrend is the free application for Siemens MindSphere that provides real-time machine monitoring and smart data collection for accurate and reliable performance analytics. The tool is lightweight, user-friendly, easy-to-configure and powerful at the same time.

Contact us to learn more: info@indx.com.

Full Transcript

Manufacturing plant floors today utilize a host of software systems and machines. The importance of monitoring production lines and gathering intelligent data from these assets is critical, but many are dealing with outdated, home-grown or ineffective software.

Part of the DiVE Suite from Engineering designed for the collection and analyzation of production plant data, DiVE FactoryTrend is the free application for Siemens MindSphere that provides real-time machine monitoring and smart data collection for accurate and reliable performance analytics. The tool is lightweight, user-friendly, easy-to-configure and powerful at the same time.

In the ‘Plant Model’ screen, we can define a plant model that represents the machines that we are interested in monitoring. We recommend users to create plant models in compliance with the ISA-95 standard. Here, we can see that we have a plant that has 1 area. The area has 1 line, and the line contains 4 pieces of equipment. 1 conveyor feeds 3 of the machines. We can also easily add a new asset. During the creation of a new piece of equipment, we can select the counters and context fields associated to that asset. Counters and context fields are defined in the screens that we will see next.

The ‘Time Model’ screen represents and displays the time slots within a production day. Every slot represents a time category.

The ‘Reason Tree” screen represents the hierarchical organization of machine states combined with the time categories. In this way, we are defining which states represent the fact that the machine is running, is in unplanned downtime, is in planned downtime, etc.

The ‘Counters’ screen allows us to define what kind of counters we are going to associate to the equipment. During the creation of a new counter, we can define the name, threshold, unit of measure and magnitude.

The ‘States’ screen lists all the possible states that a piece of equipment can assume. During the creation of a new state, we can define the name, color and raw value.

In the ‘Context Fields” screen, we can define context fields that can be associated to equipment. This will help us when trying to understand the context of the equipment when an interruption in normal functioning occurs.

The power of DiVE FactoryTrend lies in its flexible formula editor, which enables the end user to easily define new KPIs. In the “Formulae” screen, we can define formulas and KPIs. Here, we can create a new KPI and assign it a name, unit of measure and color. We can then define that KPI using the items defined within the application. For example, the formula can be the combination of Reason tree times, Counters, Context fields, and also other relevant metrics. Here, we show how we defined Availability and OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness.

When we return to our Plant Model Configurator, we can see that each machine is pointing to a MindSphere asset and aspect ‘Machine1L1’. Furthermore, we can define datapoints contained in that aspect. Here we can see the datapoint ‘State’. Then, we associate the counter ‘Good’ to the MS datapoint ‘Good’. We associate two counters and two context fields. In this other browser tab, I have preloaded the MindSphere Fleet manager, in which I show the aspect Machine1L1 and the datapoints associated to it.

Now, we switch to the ‘Analytics’ part of the application. In the ‘Analytics’ screen, we can select which equipment we want to monitor. In this case, we have the 4 machines. At the top of our interface, we have a Gantt chart that represents the evolution of the states for the monitored machines with the colors that we defined for each state. The timespan of this Gantt begins from the moment we load the page to the current point in time.

Underneath the Gantt chart, we see a table displaying information related to State, Counters, Context fields and KPIs with their real-time value. If the table visualization is not enough, we can choose to represent the KPIs in the form of gauges or bar charts.

Let’s create a new KPI that represents the total pieces produced by each machine. To do so, we can move to the “Formulae” page and create a new formula. To define this KPI, we just need to add the ‘Good’ counter metric and the ‘Bad’ counter metric, then save the formula.’ When we return to the ‘Analytics’ screen, we see our new KPI already visualized for each piece of equipment in the bar chart.

Every machine on your plant floor holds a wealth of data. Siemens MindSphere is the cloud-based operating system that helps you collect and protect it. DiVE FactoryTrend is the free application from Engineering Industries eXcellence that allows you to analyze, evaluate and visualize that data in an intelligent way and in real time, helping manufacturers improve decision-making, processes and production results in a cost-effective way. Message us at info@indx.com or visit www.engusa.com to learn more.