Champion Pet Foods MES and OEE Implementation

Champion Pet Foods built a greenfield plant in Alberta, Canada. It was designed to be a state of the art manufacturing facility taking advantage of the most modern software and hardware on the market.

Knowing the importance of understanding their process, Champion wanted to track OEE on every batch that went through the plant, including during commissioning. They needed a full recipe management system capable of tracking ingredients down to the gram, and full control over their downtime metrics—including operator input metrics if reason codes had not yet been programmed into the PLCs running the production lines.

And they needed all of it to be managed using mobile devices. Corso Systems built the solution on top of Champion’s Ignition SCADA System using the Perspective Module to meet this requirement.

MES and OEE Implementation Summary

• Inductive Automation Ignition SCADA

  • 60,000+ Tags

  • 38 PLCs

  • 60 Clients

  • Perspective Module

• Sepasoft MES

  • OEE and Production Scheduling Module

  • Recipe Management Module

• Allen Bradley PLCs

  • 38 PLCs

  • ControlLogix and CompactLogix

  • 1756 Compute Modules for high speed data collection

• SQL Server

• Infor M3 ERP

  • Ingredients

  • Inventory

  • Recipe

  • Quality Control samples and lab results

Project Implementation

Corso Systems worked with a handful of OEM companies providing specialized equipment for the production processes to define a downtime reason structure to implement in each PLC. This provided a standardized output to the Sepasoft MES Modules. Using the OEE Module once a machine was brought online, it was immediately ready to be integrated with OEE for the life of the machine—something almost unheard of in most facilities. Corso Systems created a customizable operator-selectable reason interface for reason codes not yet been programmed into the PLCs. This allowed operators to provide granular data for downtime events as they happened (or after a root cause was performed) even if the downtime reason wasn’t coded into the PLC logic.

While the PLC/Sepasoft interface was being implemented, Corso Systems worked with Champion’s Process Engineers and Schedulers to build a production scheduling interface. This included a user-customizable rules based system to automatically configure the schedule based on customer orders, ingredient availability, and product compatibility to minimize changeover time. Schedulers could overwrite the schedule as needed, and any impacted orders would be re-scheduled automatically. Schedulers were given a drag and drop interface to manage all of their duties.

All of Champion’s recipes were managed using the Sepasoft Recipe Management Module. With one button press, Champion’s operators could now select a particular work order on the schedule, pull up the recipe—and load the up to 100 individual ingredients—and process setpoints into the system.

One critical component of any OEE implementation, Quality, was handled by updating the batches once lab samples were sent out for testing. This gave Champion a complete view of their OEE within hours of a completed batch.

Results

Champion met their goal of 100% OEE coverage during the life of the equipment. Every screen was developed using Ignition’s Perspective Module for use on mobile devices. This required a fair amount of custom development, as it was ahead of the release of Sepasoft’s “official” MES Components for Perspective. Corso Systems leveraged our Engineers’ ingenuity to meet the demand and solve a problem Sepasoft would take many more months to solve by releasing their own components.