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Providing Remote Access to Plant Floor Equipment

There was a time when IT took a dim view of providing remote access to machinery on the plant floor. With this platform it’s an entirely different story.

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With headquarters in Columbus, Wis., and production facilities in five sites, American Packaging Corp. (APC),  has been as forward-thinking as any flexible film converter operating today when it comes to connecting machinery, gathering data, and analyzing it in the cloud. The business benefits derived from such efforts include real-time visibility into production and the ability to use actionable data to optimize efficiency. Here’s how Lee Blythe, Senior Process Engineer at APC, puts it.

“It’s all about having the data where we need it when we need to make a decision instead of trying to remember, or looking through paper documents, or going off of tribal knowledge passed down from person to person. Now we have definitive answers about what we did the last time, which paves the way to repeatable success.”

The platform APC has had in place since 2012 is ei3 Corp.’s  Cloud Platform for Smart Services. It lets users measure continuously and automatically as part of the process control flow. The data is collected centrally and can be viewed on HMI or mobile device dashboards and inspected by operators, quality control, and management—from every machine, every line, every plant.

At the hardware level it involves what ei3 calls its Amphion device. Built to be installed inside a machine control panel, the Amphion requires a standard Ethernet-based connection to the Internet to get connected. The Amphion supports legacy and modern fieldbus protocols alike, allowing seamless, easy access to a large variety of PLCs. Individual machines can connect through a single Amphion, whereas larger installations or plants connect through a two-tier solution with one Amphion in each machine and a dedicated Amphion providing site-wide plant access. Using this network design, ei3 supports scalability from one machine to many hundreds with full security, while only requiring the user to configure, manage, and audit a single outgoing connection. Also, this architecture allows clients to have full control of the data communicated to the cloud.

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