Tecnomatix Plant Simulation for Manufacturing
Background on Industrial Simulation
The complex production lines and manufacturing processes of today’s manufacturers are best understood through a rigorous, analytical framework. It is no surprise that digital modeling and simulation are becoming essential pieces of the manufacturing IT toolbox. Industrial simulation software provides insight into potential problems and presents opportunities for improvement in plant and production line layout, process flow and many other aspects of a manufacturer’s operations. Engineering's expertise with Tecnomatix, the manufacturing simulation software suite from Siemens, enables us to bring the power of advanced computational methods to our customers.
OEE Monitoring Systems
Our Industries eXcellence team is an experienced provider and system integrator of OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) monitoring solutions. Configuring an OEE monitoring system is often an intricate process, since it requires matching signals exposed by each piece of equipment to a logical value, and then combining those values to create different equipment states. For example, a particular machine may be in a "Running" state only if signals 1 and 3 are "ON" while signal 2 is "OFF." With very large numbers of signals typically involved, defining equipment states is a common challenge in the OEE system design and implementation process.
Delivering Tecnomatix for Manufacturing
While implementing an equipment monitoring system on six production lines in the plant of a major South American beverage bottler, our consultants leveraged Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation to speed up the equipment state definition process and stress test their OEE configuration under all possible manufacturing scenarios. During initial onsite analysis, Engineering consultants worked with the customer’s plant personnel to gather information about their production lines, manufacturing processes and the equipment being monitored.
In the pre-deployment phase, our expert team modeled the customer's production lines and bottles in different stages of their processing and packaging lifecycles using Tecnomatix Plant Simulation software. The simulation model created contained all the equipment signals discovered during the onsite analysis, plus counters for material flow and throughput. Equipment failures and material sensors built into the simulation drove the values of these signals. The Tecnomatix simulation sent data to a server via OPC, the industry standard protocol for industrial device communication.
The OEE configuration under development was set to communicate with the same data server, receiving the equipment signals being simulated by Tecnomatix. We were then able to test our configuration of the OEE software without any physical access to the equipment being monitored. By changing parameters, such as equipment failure rates, within the simulation, our team could stress test configurations and check the system for stability under all possible conditions.
Engineering's Advantage
Onsite configuration of the OEE system is often a cumbersome process requiring weeks of trial and error. Engineering’s plant and line simulation expertise gave our team the ability to test and verify their system configuration, stress test the system under all scenarios and troubleshoot problems in a controlled environment. This reduced the time spent configuring the new system considerably, as a result saving resources and costs for our customer. And by being able to perform this configuration simulation and testing remotely, Engineering also cut down on the need and effort for onsite testing. In the end, our team's industrial simulation expertise helped us design a solution to address a manufacturing problem and provide insight for performance improvement. Our technology-enabled approach made the implementation process of a cutting-edge plant floor system faster, more efficient and more cost-effective for our customer.
