As a manufacturer of engineered components for the automotive, appliance, electronics, and industrial markets, Toledo Technologies is known for advanced quality planning that leads to complete control of production parts, from concept and design through the manufacturing and packaging process. To support this initiative, the Ohio-based company tapped systems integrator/reseller, Matrix Technologies, Inc. for its expertise in providing process design engineering and factory automation strategies.
Because Toledo Technologies offers product development capabilities, the company wanted to have instantaneous access to quality results coming off their stamping lines via a reliable communications system.
To accomplish this, Toledo Technologies looked to Matrix Technologies to assemble the communication bridge that would poll certain registers in the Modicon controllers, according to a determined schedule and design an intuitive, user-configurable interface that could be used to poll additional registers in the controllers at the discretion of Toledo Technologies' process engineering department. The result of these added methods of polling will allow Toledo Technologies to further enhance its parts inspection and quality processes, resulting in increased efficiencies and support of lean manufacturing and business practices.
Toledo's main concern was that its manufacturing plant needed to streamline production and prioritize its engineering efforts for inspection processes of its stamping lines. The process engineering team saw there would be tremendous value in having factory-floor data polled and fed to MS Access on a PC, giving engineering the ability to generate all the reports needed for enhancing for part validation and inspection as well as quality control.
In addition, Toledo's front office wanted some of the data fed in one- to five-minute increments up to an AS/400. From here, the company's business departments could also have instantaneous access to data, such as approved product rates, to use in combination with fiscal, purchasing, inventory/parts control, shipping and receiving reports and decision-making. While there currently was a system in place, it was unreliable and kept locking up. It also wasn't providing the necessary data to the AS/400.
Since Toledo was already familiar with Matrix's expertise in plant floor data acquisition and processing, Matrix proceeded to configure MS Access to poll data 24-7, from registers in the Modicon controllers using Kepware'sKEPServerEx as the communication tool. They then scheduled the uploading of certain data points to the AS/400 via flat files, every five minutes so the business side could use the data from a familiar computing environment.
The KEPServerEx provided an interface that could be easily configured to select the registers in the Modicon controllers to be polled; the polling PC is communicating to a Modbus Plus network via the KEPServerEx. The solution also allowed them to schedule the polling, enabling Matrix to provide efficient service to their end user. It is currently set up so the customer can continue to select registers and schedule polling on their own for any front-office reports. Because the KEPServerEx is the communications tool, Toledo Technologies can poll data from any new equipment they may add without redoing their front-end set up.
The KEPServerEx has enabled Toledo to utilize a system where process engineering, through the polling of machine fault data and generation of data trends, can prioritize engineering efforts, thereby drilling down to the smallest occurrence of data points outside acceptable tolerances. Toledo can also immediately track process improvements before and after actions are taken, to help justify the ROI of improvements.
This system also contributes to a leaner supply chain by combining the factory floor data with the QAD system on the AS/400 for material planning and inventory control. This enables business departments such as purchasing, to make more informed decisions on quantities and inventory timing.
"Matrix Technologies integrated the KEPServerEx into a robust software package that enabled us to automatically collect valuable plant-floor data, track process improvements and cost savings, monitor quality and prioritize engineering efforts," says Jeannine Crumley an engineer with Toledo Technologies.
"By using the KEPServerEx for communications with the plant floor controllers, we were able to implement in two days instead of two weeks," says Matrix's Kurt Teschendorf, who served as lead project engineer. "It prevented us from having to learn the underlying protocols for the communications segment of the project, thereby spending our time on configuring the application that would best serve the client."
