Drives & Controls March 2022

25 www.drivesncontrols.com March 2022 DIGITALISATION n infrastructure is increasingly complex, and responsibility for sustainability is often unclear or siloed. The first step in any such upgrading project is ensuring that you have a complete view of your installed base. This isn’t just a matter of listing what you have in terms of VSDs, PLCs, HMIs, UPSs and so on. It is about auditing how important they are to your operation – or are they perhaps obsolete? The first step is low-voltage inventory mapping, contextualising plant assets in a unified view of all the site’s automation inventory. From here, it is essential to assess the lifecycle status of those assets. Do you have a maintenance plan? Have you got spare parts? What risk do they present to the business? Flint suffered from old, obsolete equipment from multiple vendors. Full audit information from the site was digitised providing visibility over the installed base. This allowed several steps to be taken: • modernising the installed LV base; • digitising the start-of-shift system; • adding smart metering, smart lighting and remote monitoring; and • implementing an AR (augmented reality) manual to make repair easier while allowing staff to know they have spare parts in stock. Single line to electrical distribution The second facet of preparing for the future factory was understanding the electrical distribution system. At Flint, a confusing paper system had resulted in an outdated, unreliable and uncontrollable network. Work was undertaken to digitise the single line diagram (SLD) with an intelligent digital model, providing full visibility. This enabled a digital twin to be created to assist with root cause analysis, fault-finding during maintenance activities, and change modelling. Security Manufacturers are at risk from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks from malware and ransomware. While Flint was cyber-secure in its general operations, it had not yet embraced IoT technologies, and therefore lacked policies and procedures to ensure safety across its connected assets. Security Cybersecurity must come first when realising the benefits of increased connectivity and data-led automation. A comprehensive audit, based on the IEC 62443 standard, and developed to secure industrial automation and control systems, must form the basis of this strategy. This should be paired with expert analysis to identify risks, prioritise gaps and recommend steps for remediation. Now Flint is a fully digitised factory with every machine connected. This could only be achieved with a robust foundation of cybersecurity including anomaly detection using AI and machine learning. Starting the journey to retrofitting factories of the future begins with a deep understanding of the existing details. Smart auditing leads to sustainable strategies that deliver across objectives. Despite a 20% decrease in demand in 2020 due to Covid-19, Flint's operational efficiency improved by 5% compared to 2019 levels and its productivity rose by 4%. This alone represented a £240,000 saving. The transformation also delivered a range of sustainability benefits. Water consumption was halved, while improvements to efficiency associated with the installation of variable-speed drives, smart panels, and other technologies, led to a 15% decrease in electricity usage compared to 2019. Without understanding the present, industry cannot meet its carbon reduction targets. Worryingly, just 29% of manufacturers have started measuring energy use and identifying energy waste. Similarly, only a third claim to have mapped their entire carbon footprint, while one in six have not yet done any mapping of their carbon emissions at all. While businesses have the appetite and enthusiasm for future-proof sustainability, many are sitting with a blank sheet of paper. Right now, when future-proofing is a must- act strategy, knowledge is power – information and insight is your greatest asset. n World’s biggest instant coffee plant savours the benefits of predictive maintenance Adopting predictive maintenance at a Nescafé plant in Mexico has helped Nestlé to avoid three unplanned stoppages that could have cost it up to $52,000 per hour. Nestle’s Nescafé plant in Toluca, Mexico, is world’s largest facility for producing soluble coffee. In 2013, the company invested around $125m in the site to expand its production capacity by 40%, and the plant now produces more than one million jars of coffee every day. Avoiding downtime is critical. Until recently, maintenance at the factory was reactive. But eight unplanned stoppages in one year – including a short-circuit inside the main substation that resulted in a 14-hour shutdown costing around $588,000 – saw production faltering. Nestlé therefore decided to implement a predictive maintenance technology – Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Asset Advisor software – that would allow it to monitor and manage the site’s power systems remotely, around the clock, to deliver productivity, efficiency, and maintenance benefits. The implementation has moved the factory to operating on a predictive maintenance basis that allows Nestlé’s electrical teams to resolve issues proactively. By relying on data analytics to dictate service intervals, the teams now spend less time reacting to issues, and the plant’s equipment spends more time performing optimally. The installation has already helped to avoid three unplanned stoppages that could have cost Nestlé up to $52,000 per hour. It has improved uptime reliability, as well as providing greater visibility and operational flexibility at the site. “With a plant as large as Nestlé Nescafé, ensuring reliability of all the electrical systems is a particularly involved task,”explains Luis Gilberto López Páez, an electricity specialist with Nestlé Toluca Cafés.“Across our operational network, we have been deploying flexible and scalable digital solutions to enhance our responsiveness. Since deployment, EcoStruxure Asset Advisor has allowed us to identify hotspots and attack them before they become a problem.” Nestlé and Schneider Electric previously collaborated at production facilities in France and Switzerland. Implementing a predictive maintenance system has given Nestlé real-time visibility into its electrical equipment, allowing engineers to monitor assets remotely.