Ignition Transforms Complex Processes & Allows For Long-Term Planning
In an industry like pharmaceuticals, maintaining quality and compliance is a strict requirement, not an optional goal. Outdated or ineffective technologies and methods can not only hamper efficiency, but also stunt growth and potentially affect product quality.
That was the situation Sandalwood Systems Integration Group found itself in with one customer who was having difficulty bridging the gap between their scheduling application and their ERP system. Sandalwood leveraged Ignition — an industrial automation platform for SCADA, HMI, IIoT, and more — to deliver a solution that completely revolutionized the customer’s production processes.
Minding the Gap
The customer was struggling with a recipe control gap. While their ERP system provided meticulous high-level recipe control and monitoring, the plant floor lacked real-time data as well as access to scheduling and optimization tools, relying instead on an in-house Excel-based application to schedule multiple sterilization lines.
Sterilization scheduling can be a complex process: components must be sterilized in time to feed fill lines, which are predicated on the downstream demand of the final product. On top of that, the existing inventory of sterilized components needs to be considered when determining production quotas. Relying on Excel macros for batch preparation did not offer the flexibility or scalability required to effectively manage the sterilization lines, resulting in a system that could only schedule a few days at a time, hindering long-term planning efforts.
“We were initially given a copy of the Excel-based application and asked to duplicate it in Ignition, which acted as our initial requirements,” said Bob Sloma, Digital Transformation Lead & SME, Systems Integration Services at Sandalwood. “As you can imagine with an Excel-based application, figuring out what they were doing by analyzing the VBA code was a challenging task.”
Even consulting with the application’s developer, it was a challenge to dig through layers of code and determine which reports were actually being used, as it became evident that certain reports were more vital than others. The Excel application determined the best overall schedule by calculating all possible routings and their overall durations. This brute-force approach could not produce a full schedule without overloading the machine running the application. Clearly, it had reached the limit of its efficacy. “I have significant experience with MRP and production scheduling with my 30-plus years of experience and knew there was a better way to do this,” said Sloma.
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