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Motiontronix - South Africa
OPC DataHub Helps Eliminate Downtime and Save $21,000,000
Motiontronix, a Wonderware Certified Systems Integrator in Johannesburg, South Africa eliminated at least 30 days of downtime, saving their customer over $21,000,000 in lost production value by using the OPC DataHub together with Software Toolbox's TOP Server OPC Server. This software combination allows an old and new control system to operate in parallel and share information so operators always know what is happening during a changeover. Motiontronix expects similar projects at larger sites to yield savings of over $57,000,000.
The Problem
Motiontronix's customer, a large food-processing mill, operates day and night. Recently they needed to upgrade their control system from old Modbus serial devices to new Mitsubishi Q series PLCs. Previously, this kind of upgrade took round-the-clock shifts working for four days because the old and new systems could not communicate in parallel, and lost production had to be minimized. This meant extra costs, and errors due to sleepless nights. Worse still, when an operator selected an operation from the old system during the changeover, operators and engineers testing the new system could not see the changes.
"The overall system normally consists of about 7 to 8 PLCs with approximately 3500 I/O points," said Rudi Van Der Merwe of Motiontronix. "Assuming you take just one minute on each I/O point for checkout you need about 60 hours to change from the old to the new system if there aren't any problems. Reality is there are always problems so changeovers take even longer. Production time lost in the conventional method would have been a minimum of 1.5 to 2 months."
What Motiontronix needed was a way to check the new system before taking the old system offline. An ideal solution would maintain all tags, and allow each PLC to be replaced in turn, running in parallel with the old system until the changeover was complete. In effect, what they needed was a temporarily redundant system, that would allow switch back and forth from the old to the new, if necessary.
The Solution
Working with Cogent's Sales and Technical Partner, Software Toolbox, Rudi was able to use their TOP Server with the OPC DataHub to achieve all of these goals. He configured Software Toolbox's TOP Server Mitsubishi Suite driver with its SuiteLink and OPC interfaces to provide data to the new InTouch application. And he used two OPC DataHubs to aggregate and distribute data from both the old and new PLCs, which allowed the two SCADA systems to share data sets. All of this was done without using DCOM, a key consideration for reliability and ease of configuration.
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