It can be hypnotizing standing on Tree Top’s plant floor, looking out at its grand orchestration of custom robotics. But between all the automated box folders, spinning packet distributors, and conveyors ferrying jars from one machine to the next, one question vexed upper management: How efficient was all of this?
For Tree Top — a farmer-owned co-op that provides consumer-packaged fruit goods and ingredients all over the world — this had been a complicated and time-consuming question to answer.
Partially, it was an issue of scale. As Drew Dixon, Selah Plant Manufacturing Manager at Tree Top put it, “We’re running these massive facilities. Hundreds of employees. It’s very complex. We’re not just running one big line. We’re running 10 big lines at one time, and there’s parts and pieces moving all over.” Spread throughout Washington, Oregon, and California, Tree Top runs six facilities, each with their own production responsibilities.
For over 10 years, Tree Top has been using Ignition — the enterprise industrial integration platform for SCADA, HMI, IIoT, and more — to control, record, and interact with their manufacturing equipment, all from a central location. With Ignition’s historian, Tree Top can view important data such as historical records, temperature, and flow rates. “The amount of information is just astounding when you start digging,” said Dixon. “Felt like, hey, there’s a whole world of possibilities with this platform.”
Tree Top recognized a gap between their ability to collect data and gain actionable insight from it. They needed a unified, real-time operational view that could empower them to make decisions quickly, confidently, and consistently across all six sites.
They needed MES.
The Search for MES
Tree Top turned to CedarTech — a systems integrator based in Roseville, California who had originally implemented Ignition for them — to expand the system to incorporate MES. After a brief dalliance with the idea of building the solution from scratch, Tree Top decided to use Kanoa MES, a modular manufacturing execution system built on the Ignition platform.
“They’re using Ignition for pretty much all of their MES operations,” said Samuel Leonetti, Automation Systems Engineer at CedarTech. CedarTech started with an enterprise-first architecture, defining a standardized data model for all of Tree Top’s plants before customizing for each facility’s specialized needs. With a secure endpoint created using Ignition’s Web Development Module, Tree Top’s ERP system sends production order data to Ignition via MQTT, where the information can be validated, and then passed into Kanoa’s database schema, including custom end-of-shift reports.
All of this is accomplished using Kanoa’s standard scripting libraries, which are included in the foundational Kanoa Ops Module. “Everything is very well documented,” said Ethan Thomason, Automation Engineer at CedarTech, “which makes it easy to get data in and out of the system without ever touching SQL.”
The combination of Ignition and Kanoa proved an ideal match for Tree Top due to the balance of immediate functionality and customization. “We deploy Kanoa and within a very, very short amount of time, they’re already getting value,” said Leonetti. “It also allows you to describe your operations in the system exactly as they are, and it allows you to build your entire organizational structure one-to-one.”
“Kind of the best of both worlds, because it’s an out-of-the-box, but I can also talk to them and say, ‘Well, this is good, but let’s add a new feature.’ And because it’s Ignition, they’re always like, ‘Oh yeah, we can do that,’” said Nathan Walden, Controls Engineer at Tree Top. “The project with Tree Top has been a project where I’ve kind of been able to see their Digital Transformation take place from start to finish,” said Leonetti. “It’s been a process where I’ve been able to see them go from completely manual entry to a full-fledged MES system in a remarkably short amount of time.”
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