Monitoring Quality

Richard Burbridge has recently invested in Wonderware’s historian and new data acquisition hardware to streamlined effect. How does this software provide new manufacturing production information?

EXPERTS IN balustrade, Richard Burbidge supplies a wide range of systems for use inside and outside the home – on staircases, decks, patios and balconies. Renowned for working with wood, the company also offers an extensive collection of timber mouldings. Richard Burbidge is proud of its heritage, and continuously works to develop the next generation of high quality timber products and to stay at the forefront of the industry. This is all based upon accurate
production information, which allows maximum machine utilisation and sustained continuous improvement.

A legacy data acquisition and reporting system was not providing accurate and real time information for operations management. A radical new solution was required. Richard Burbidge operations contacted Wonderware UK, based upon previous individual success
with Wonderware products. The machines that convert the raw stock to Richard Burbidge’s
range of profiled stair products are dedicated to use and contain a low level of automation –
they are designed for volume manufacture. The decision was made to use ADAM IO units as
remote data acquisition (tapping into electrical signals on the machines) and to feed the data
to Wonderware Historian – which is able to both acquire data very quickly and also store large amounts of data.

At the core of Historian is a standard SQL database, this easily facilitates the integration with Microsoft Office. This was utilised by the IT department to produce a series of production reports from the raw data available in Historian.

The company is run on the generic principles of lean manufacturing, thus continuous data acquisition is required to ensure that improvements are sustained, and new targets can be set upon sound and stable incremental improvements. The data from Historian becomes a percentage figure representing performance; with implicit machine availability information being derived from the number of spindles produced per ten minute period; zero is assumed to be either planned downtime or a machine fault. What would be the third classic component of OEE, Quality, is not automated as this involves visual inspection during endof- line handling, and other safeguards. The visual inspection is for knots, cracks and other aesthetic issues, features that are sometimes only revealed when the timber has been worked. Raw material (timber) is inspected by an optical process; this is currently under evaluation for integration to the data acquisition scheme, as a closer look at packaging operations. Traceability is a prime requirement when different timber from different sources produces variations in performance and quality.

The project was undertaken by the in-house IT department following two days training at Wonderware UK’s headquarters in Cheadle. It took four months from start to completion, which included procurement, installation and testing of the ADAM data acquisition IO units (from HardwarePT), new networking equipment and the Historian to Microsoft Office integration (and testing). Commenting upon this, Mr Kevin Williams, IT Manager, said: “The integration of Wonderware Historian with MS Office was remarkably straightforward and was achieved following the 2 day training course.” Kevin went on to say that the whole experience with Wonderware Historian was new to him has he had not used real time manufacturing software before. When prompted for alternative solutions he said that these would have essentially been bespoke and that they would have taken longer to develop and test and also would have raised longer term support and expansion issues.

Steve Clarke, Operations Director at Richard Burbidge, said that he had seen Wonderware products in use before and had no reservations in proceeding with the Historian solution, adding: “The Company can further exploit Historian by expansion of its data acquisition network to include other machines.” Steve extracts as much data as possible from the production resource; the resulting real-time information is shared with operations managers and with shop-floor team leaders. Future development may include the use of Wonderware’s Active Factory to produce interactive reports and wider information dissemination and acquiring energy usage data.

An interesting fact has been realised that, even though machine productivity is high, with
some procedural changes the same capacity could be obtained with fewer machines (many of
which are producing the same part in parallel).

This would reduce energy costs and allow manufacturing to be done in a much reduced
footprint. This later point would normally be hard to gain true benefit from, however, the company has announced that it will be relocating in the area, and a reduction in the size of factory required would immediately make savings.

Historian and its associated data acquisition scheme have allowed Richard Burbidge to gain
control of its production process and to be better prepared for its relocation and changes in
the market which they supply. Even after 140 years of being in the business the use of
Historian to provide manufacturing insight has provided some surprising results at Richard
Burbidge – sustained continuous improvement, every step of the way.

For more information visit: www. richardburbidge.com