A company approached Wenger, a specialist in extrusion processes, about an idea to manufacture a biodegradable packing peanut. The new peanut would need to have many of the same production requirements as traditional peanuts; however, it must incorporate materials that were less impactful to the environment.
The challenge involves creating hundreds of production runs of the peanuts and capturing process data and peanut data from the PLC with each run in an SQL database. The peanut had to meet packing specs all while achieving the new environmental goals. Once a successful production run was achieved, those parameters could be recalled for implementation into a full-scale production process.
The process was setup at Wenger’s manufacturing test lab at its Technical Center using Wenger’s extrusion expertise and dryer technologies, and Rockwell’s ControlLogix PLCs.
Wenger installed tManager from Softing, a ControlLogix in-chassis PLC module, to capture and time-stamping real-time production runs and store the data in an SQL database. After hundreds of incremental manufacturing runs, Wenger successfully provided the customer with process data that optimized the new peanut’s material formulation. The customer has since used this information to scale up production of this new, sustainable product across four plants.
This is one of thousands of examples where product and process improvements have been achieved in today’s data-driven manufacturing environments where plant floor control systems exchange information with enterprise computing systems.
Transaction managers, like the tManager Enterprise Appliance Transaction Module from Softing, provide this critical bridge, simplifying the data integration process between PLCs and higher-level systems such as databases or cloud storage.
This solution has many operational advantages: tManager enables seamless enterprise-to-controller connectivity. It also offers robust data-handling capabilities, ease of usability and superior security, store and forward, all while eliminating the need for software coding or a PC in the middle.
Since tManager is an in-chassis PLC ControlLogix module, Allen-Bradley users will instantly feel at home configuring connectivity – no coding, no OPC, and no PC in the middle.
Read more about this application and how tManager helps food process industries capture and prove critical temperature data, even when the network goes down, to save food from being discarded due to lost audit trails.
This content is sponsored by Softing.
