The Future Factory Initiative (FFI) is a joint effort of SAP Research and external partner organizations, including ICONICS. It is active in key areas including a Living Lab, a Real-World Manufacturing Testbed and a Center of Excellence. The initiative is a set of innovative demonstrators showing the potential of real-world-integrated business processes in the manufacturing domain. The challenge was to create a testbed that shows leading edge software and the latest hardware developments with different scenarios, products, and prototypes in a distributed manufacturing environment. The testbed needed to span multiple manufacturers and demonstrate the viability of prototypes.

The Ceramic Factory - Botevgrad has experienced recent growth as the construction industry continues to grow in Bulgaria. The company required visualization of the manufacturing processes involving its furnaces as well as of the transportation line for the produced bricks. The factory also sought an additional module for reports to help management mitigate downtime issues and increase productivity. The company realized that as business grew, it would require premium, robust solutions to meet its visualization, control and reporting needs. The selected solution would need to integrate with the company’s existing VIPA PLCs, approximately 150 I/O points and KEP OPC Server for Siemens PLCs. In addition, The Ceramic Factory – Botevgrad sought HMI/SCADA and reporting solutions that would also work with its Microsoft Access database and its desktops and servers running Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

Ford Motor Company contracted with Comau Pico to design and install multiple cold and hot test stands at the Dearborn Engine plant. The requirement was to perform 100 percent testing of every engine produced at this plant (4 & 6 cylinder engines) along with the logging and trending of results for both cold and hot testing. Cold testing does not use gasoline and the engine is basically driven by an external motor. All fluids are installed and the engine is run through its cycles. Hot testing involves adding gasoline and actually starting and running the engine through various test cycles. The test stands perform measurements on the heating and cooling of fluids as well as exhaust gases, spark timing and advancement through the RPM range. Testing is also done on the air combustion mixture of exhaust gases and fuel mixtures of the injection systems.

Dynastar aimed to update the automation capabilities of its Sallanches location, a 28,000 square-meter facility producing over 300,000 skis per year. Its objectives for this project was to reduce energy consumption related to its manufacturing process, as well as implement a global visualization interface. The company wanted a system that could rationalize the use of production equipment as well as provide warnings of hardware failure. At the time, the company was running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with multiple Web clients, as well as SQL Server, in addition to Excel, for its database needs. Its existing manufacturing system was comprised of TREND and Honeywell devices, in addition to hundreds of other tags, all of which required an easily integrated automation solution. The French ski manufacturer required a supervisory product that could allow product managers to set, view and make use of real-time availability requirements of workshops and equipment.

The large-scale Russian energy provider has had basic direct digital control (DDC) for many years. Working with its system integrator, RVS, the firm initiated a major optimization effort, with a preference towards utilizing the latest software technology while simultaneously ensuring integration with a wide variety of data sources. The firm sought a solution that could handle the data from four thermal power plant (TPP) production branches (each with approximately 5,000 I/O points) as well as from its executive office. An additional major need of the plant was to provide a uniform, insightful user interface to all operations and levels of management. The company required dashboards that could provide needed insight in order to drive immediate improvement actions. The site also sought a major upgrade in its reporting capabilities. Prior to considering this upgrade, a legacy data historian from OSI PI provided limited visualization and report capability, but could not provide the depth of information available.

Hydrovision Ltd., a leading manufacturer of Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), required a new scalable control system for their ROVs, sub-sea tooling, and other custom tooling applications. The specifications demanded a PC-based system running under a Windows operating system and meeting open standards like OPC. The system needed to be scalable, maintainable, easy to modify after implementation, and economical. The company also wanted a system that would allow their customers to make their own modifications to the machines for different tooling or use applications.

The International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Braga, Portugal, required a comprehensive, state-of-the-art HMI/SCADA system to handle its building management. The complex is divided into a hotel for resident researchers and the main building, where clean rooms, laboratories, high accuracy areas and administrative offices are located. The application involved deploying an ICONICS integrated Building Management System, paying special attention to the clean room and high accuracy and laboratory areas, as well as to the critical process systems. Critical areas such as clean rooms and high accuracy labs don’t allow any downtime for the HVAC system, because most of the experiments carried out in these zones are expensive and take a long time. Should any failure occur while an experiment is being carried out, it would have to be started from the beginning, implying additional and unacceptable costs. On the other hand, the HVAC system for these areas was designed to work 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. In addition to the temperature, humidity and pressure data monitoring and collection for the certification of the clean rooms, it was an additional challenge to control the temperature in the high accuracy rooms with a required accuracy of ±0.1ºC.

InSinkErator, a division of Emerson Electric Co., is the world’s largest manufacturer of food waste disposers and instant hot water dispensers. As part of their continuous improvement efforts, InSinkErator was looking for a way to increase their productivity and efficiency. They decided to improve efficiency within their existing buildings and identified the need to provide management with visualization of manufacturing problem areas. By closely monitoring and analyzing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI), InSinkErator could implement improvements to its production processes.

Mondi Packaging Paper Štětí a.s. is a leading producer of industrial packaging and paper materials. The company operates a large production plant in the Czech Republic, which receives 1000 tons of timber daily and produces 1,500 tons of pulp and paper each day. The plant, which is the largest ICONICS Web application in Europe, has over 100 buildings and employs over 1000 people. The company needed a robust and efficient system to handle the enormous amount of data generated by the plant and to provide real-time visualization of the plant’s operations.

Ontario Power, one of North America’s largest power generators, planned to upgrade its generating stations over the next few years. The generating station being modernized had a production capacity of 240MW and comprised of one main computer supervising 8 generators including plant services equipment. There were 10 local control stations one for each unit, running on industrial type computers. The project had unique requirements, necessitating the use of the new OPC driver for “data mining” in the Unified Tag Browser within GENESIS32, which allows database write and read connections using standard SCADA graphics to a Microsoft database.

Preciosa Ornela, a.s., a division of the Preciosa Group, is a specialized glass company involved with metallurgical production, glassmaking, and the manufacturing of raw materials for jewelry. The company required an update to their existing 32-bit HMI/SCADA software involved with the monitoring of temperatures, electrical parameters, and combustion ratio glass sets as part of their production processes. The company was happy with its existing GENESIS32 installation but wanted to add the multiple modern features included in newer 64-bit software. After evaluating offerings from multiple vendors, Preciosa Ornela decided to remain an ICONICS customer and chose GENESIS64.

VEC Technology required an HMI/SCADA solution coupled with data bridging/reporting/archiving that can be used over the Web, can integrate with the OPC communications protocol and can directly interface with the company’s product databases. They required the solution to control and monitor the company’s patented closed molding operations. They wanted a system that could manage various parameters based on several criteria, including the specific product being produced, ambient conditions and material properties. Also necessary was the ability to provide long term storage of multiple key parameters for product warranty information. The company sought a product with future-proof technology. They also looked for a solution that presented a simple user interface for making edits, as well as an easily maintained Web-based client/server architecture. VEC Technology aimed for a “single vendor” approach, intending to reduce both the number of automation interfaces as well as extra support staff to maintain various systems.

United Biscuits, specifically their McVitie’s brand, was looking to automate their biscuit baking process. The challenge was to translate the intelligence of more than 30 years of experience into an automatic, high-performance process control system that was user-friendly and could be retrofitted on the existing equipment. The control of the oven, which produces thousands of biscuits per hour, was previously governed by an operator with many years of experience. The knowledge of this operator was documented and formulated into a set of rules for adjusting the oven control based on the quality of the biscuits exiting the oven.

Thermo Systems is a leader in the design and installation of mission critical PLC-based control systems. They specialize in the automation of validated pharmaceutical HVAC systems, utility systems, and validated manufacturing applications. However, the controls market has changed over the past few years, creating an ever-growing demand for open, standardized, and reliable software systems. Thermo Systems needed a software solution that could meet these demands, provide a wide range of programs and features, and comply with the latest FDA regulations.

Tefal SAS, a subsidiary of Groupe SEB, is a global leader in small household equipment. The company manufactures around 44 million products annually in a high energy-consuming process. The energy costs for manufacturing operations could reach as high as eight million euros, split between four million for electricity costs and four million for gas. Given these numbers, Tefal decided to launch an Energy Efficiency project to reduce manufacturing-related energy costs. The company began the project by making an energy diagnosis, in order to learn real-time consumption levels towards the goal of making improvements leading to energy-related savings. Tefal sought an energy management system that could be implemented without revising their existing architecture. They aimed to connect the new system to equipment already in place, using standard communication protocols such as OPC, for use of real-time data in addition to archiving and recovery.

AFV Beltrame S.p.A. was in search of an HMI/ SCADA solution to better visualize and control processes within its multiple plant locations. These processes included lowering pollution within fusion furnaces, cooling, stocking, and the insertion of iron alloys in silos. Each plant had its own graphical interface, settings, and alarm requirements. In addition to a robust system for the set-up, monitoring, and control of its plants, AFV Beltrame S.p.A. required a solution that was easy and fast to develop and deploy. The selected system would need to easily handle several thousand tags and I/O points, working with existing Allen Bradley PLCs. An additional need was the integration with the company’s existing Microsoft SQL Server installation.

Adif, a railway systems administrator based in Madrid, Spain, manages enormous amounts of information from various sources. The organization had hundreds of applications within the organization, with the same kind of information repeated in different systems. This complicated the information-collection process and created confusion and inaccuracy. Adif needed a solution that would provide a single point of access to information from various systems and applications. The organization wanted to build a centralized, Oracle-based data warehouse and use robust BI to provide company-wide reporting and analysis against that information.

Apollo Vredestein, a Dutch tire producer, was facing the challenge of producing a consolidated reporting system that could convey data from a multitude of sources in a consistent way. This was to simplify reporting, analytics, and information delivery throughout the enterprise. The company had a best-of-breed IT strategy, using a combination of packaged and homegrown systems to meet its business needs. However, this made it difficult to achieve a single, consolidated view of critical information for decision-making purposes. The company needed a solution that could address this challenge and provide a comprehensive business intelligence platform for reporting, analyzing, and presenting business information.

Appvion, a manufacturer of paper coating and chemical products, was facing issues with information access and quality. Different departments were using different tools and data, leading to inconsistencies and a lack of governance over data usage and sharing. Information was scattered across numerous applications, warehouses, marts, and spreadsheets. The company was in search of a single platform that could meet the needs of all its departments and users, support its data warehousing strategy, preserve data quality, and enable robust analytics.

The telecommunications service provider market is not only saturated with offers, but also experiencing a sharp increase in the number of users with data plans, which has led to an increase in network traffic. Due to this rapid growth and escalating demand, it is becoming increasingly difficult for service providers to plan and scale network infrastructures to accommodate steady increases in data traffic. In such a competitive market, companies need to constantly improve the quality of services offered to their customers, and they are always looking for ways to optimize their offerings. Many telecommunication service providers are adopting performance management technology to better monitor, measure, and assess the performance of critical IT resources. Other providers look to big data and predictive analytics to troubleshoot incidents and events in the data center. This is all part of a steady shift from a reactive to a proactive performance management model, as service providers work to ensure greater uptime, and thus, more exceptional experiences for their customers.

Diakonessenhuis, a top Dutch hospital, was facing increasing demands for information from various stakeholders including health insurers, the press, the Netherlands Healthcare Inspectorate, and patients. Internally, the hospital needed to use information to deploy staff and resources, organize departments, and account for budgetary decisions. The rising B Segment system in the nation, which allows certain healthcare costs to be negotiable, was causing more healthcare providers to invest in cost-driven management. This required real-time access to complete and accurate data from across the facility. Previously, reports were compiled centrally once a month and if a specific question was not addressed in the report, it often took days to get the answer. This led to decisions often being based on intuition, without first consulting valid information.

The Hillman Group, a leading manufacturer of fasteners such as nuts, bolts, screws, and washers, was aiming to improve productivity at its three manufacturing facilities and eight distribution centers. The company wanted to implement lean manufacturing initiatives, which involve scrutinizing business processes to remove waste and eliminate unnecessary effort. However, these strategies work best when information related to production, supply, and distribution can be successfully synchronized. The company was facing challenges in accessing and analyzing data from a wide variety of transaction systems, which was crucial for cutting costs and boosting efficiency throughout the organization. Additionally, Hillman previously had 14 different methods for measuring open orders, leading to inconsistencies in sales reporting and forecasts.

Julius Zorn, Ltd. (Juzo), a leading healthcare products manufacturer, was facing challenges in enhancing customer service through improved product quality and accelerated order delivery times. The company's success strategy was based on high-quality products, first-class personalized customer service, and strict adherence to delivery dates. However, smooth and efficient processes were essential, particularly in the case of custom-made bandages or compression clothing, which needed to be delivered quickly and reliably. Juzo could not afford a shortage of resources or other weak spots within its order processing procedures. To ensure smooth operation and adherence to delivery dates, the company needed to oversee data flow throughout the entire production cycle, from consulting and order acceptance through product delivery.

L.B. Foster, a leading manufacturer, fabricator, and distributor of high-quality transportation and construction materials, faced challenges in accessing, analyzing, and presenting information in a cohesive and timely way due to its diverse software infrastructure. This included packaged applications such as a JD Edwards World enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a Sage SalesLogix CRM system, and more than 200 IBM Lotus Notes applications. As the company grew and its pace of business accelerated, the ability to access and analyze information became critical for company managers. For instance, production personnel were creating bills of materials by hand for shop floor operations, a process that took two to three hours every day. They had to extract data from JD Edwards, key it into Microsoft Excel, analyze it, print it, and distribute it.

Panasonic Electric Works (PEW) recognized the importance of using the massive volume of data generated from daily corporate activities to evaluate the state of the business and forecast future conditions. However, the reporting tools chosen and implemented by end users required extensive data preparation before analysis, leading to significant dependence on IT. The Lighting and Control Device Divisions of PEW needed a data-analysis platform that could better support supply-chain management and work seamlessly with the related systems that were deployed a few years prior. They needed a tool that offered simple data preparation, so reports could be generated and modified quickly based on user requests.

Steel Technologies, a steel processor with 24 facilities located throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, needed to carefully track steel as it moves through the supply chain. This was one of the main factors that motivated the company to acquire business intelligence (BI) and integration technology from Information Builders. The company's customers expect to see an accounting of every pound of steel that they process, including scrap. As a $2 billion company, a large portion of Steel Technologies' capital is tied up in inventory. The company uses business intelligence to keep a finger on the pulse of where their inventory stands at any point in time. They use integration technology to load their data mart and simplify their EDI connections. Before the implementation of iWay, Steel Technologies had unique EDI maps for every trading partner. They were maintaining hundreds of maps, which made it difficult to respond in a timely fashion to new business requirements. They had a tremendous backlog of requests to add new trading partners.

The global manufacturing company was dealing with a data explosion due to acquisition, organic growth, and product expansion. The company had hundreds of disparate ERP systems, each with massive volumes of data, multiple ERP vendors, and multiple versions of ERP software, which added to the complexity. The company was using relational databases and ETL tools to integrate the data, but the process was slowing innovation and sometimes resulted in data quality issues, which could lead to negative customer experiences. The company needed to integrate its ERP systems, eliminating costly data siloes and time-consuming ETL processes in order to gain a 360-degree view of its data. The organization embarked on a massive integration project using traditional relational tools. After three years, the company had only integrated four of the hundreds of ERP systems. At this pace, the entire system would not be fully integrated for decades, resulting in the organization missing out on numerous opportunities and exposing the company to potential risk.

JC Precision Milling, a precision CNC shop, was facing challenges with their existing ERP system, JobBoss, which was not meeting their shop’s or their customers’ needs. The lack of a robust scheduling program made it difficult to estimate job durations, locate jobs on the shop floor, and ensure smooth workflow. This resulted in delayed deliveries and dissatisfied customers. The company realized the need for a better software solution to improve their operations and customer service.

Jonal Laboratories, a company that creates compounds and turns those into seals for the aerospace industry, was facing challenges with their old systems. They were using an AS400 system from the late ‘80s for most of the manufacturing side, Excel for quality, and QuickBooks and Excel for their accounting system. It was difficult to find information, and even when you did, you couldn’t be sure it was accurate and up to date. The old systems were making it much harder to train new people and keep jobs moving in the shop. As they hired a lot of new employees, they realized that their systems didn’t make sense to outsiders. They needed a system that could make their specialized knowledge easy to find and ensure that they’re looking at current information.

Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE) wanted to create a central media repository to store and archive all of its digital broadcasting workflow, from production and ingest through editing, post-production and play-out. The storage system needed to support a wide variety of devices and software packages, including ingest devices, editing stations running Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid, as well as play-out servers from Harris. The solution also needed to integrate with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution which would be implemented during the second phase of the project. The solution not only needed to enable full connectivity and content sharing between heterogeneous systems, but allow them to work simultaneously, at full speed, without dropping frames or causing delays.