Headquartered in Guelph, Ontario, Linamar is a publicly traded manufacturer of auto components, assemblies, and castings. It is the second largest automobile parts manufacturer in Canada and supplies its products to markets around the world from manufacturing centres in Canada, U.S.A., Mexico, France, Germany, Hungary and China.
The challenge
Linamar is no stranger to the tight deadlines and high-volume production levels required by the automotive industry. But one customer was pushing the limits even higher. Linamar needed more insight into its production systems to identify problem areas through a standardised data collection and presentation strategy.
A typical Linamar manufacturing line has 50 to 60 production machines that are controlled by 15 disparate systems. As such, it was difficult and time consuming to extract data from each machine and consolidate it for tracking trends, machine performance, and other parameters. Management launched a project to create a corporate-wide standard for data collection and consolidation that would help the company gain greater insight into operating processes and support the creation and tracking of process improvements.
“We needed a data consolidation solution that would paint the entire picture of our manufacturing processes, rather than just provide islands of information,” says Matthew Aho, controls engineer at Linamar. “We needed greater visibility into each machine and each process in order to reach our project goals and customer timelines.
“We knew a little bit about Kepware’s fundamental capabilities, but we weren’t aware of the sheer power of their solution. We liked everything we read about KepServer’s Advanced Tags and with the Manufacturing Suite of drivers. We could not find another platform that fitted better with our existing hardware and infrastructure.
The approach
With a pilot launched a year and a half ago, Linamar deployed Kepware’s established KEPServerEX V5 Communication Platform. KEPServerEX’s Manufacturing Suite includes over 100 communication drivers that it was able to utilise, including the User Configurable Driver, Allen-Bradley ControlLogix, GE Focas, Siemens Ethernet and Modbus, to name a few. It also used KEPServerEX’s Advanced Tag option to link data to and from the various control devices. Kepware’s KEPServerEX and plug-in options were able to capture data from 99% of Linamar’s machinery controls. Aho notes that the implementation was very easy to configure and set up.
“Advanced Tags, for example, is a breeze to learn if you’re familiar with tag-based control systems and even for new users the learning curve is easy,” he says. “I had no problems deploying it, even when implementing the more sophisticated Kepware components, such as connecting the UCON driver to random OPC drivers, there were zero problems.”
The Kepware solution streamlines data consolidation among three distinct modules – productivity, quality, and maintenance – each of which offer different sets of information.
Linamar also uses Kepware to facilitate its process of constraint analysis, which automates the identification of bottlenecks in the manufacturing processes. As such, it can connect to all of the machines in a facility in a common format and can manipulate the data consistently, resulting in greater data accuracy.
In the maintenance area, Linamar has launched a pilot project with the Kepware solution that will enable it to collect and analyse all alarms from disparate control systems. Based on the alarm data, breakdown trends and other machinery analytics that will help the company establish preventative maintenance initiatives and standard hardware lists for spare parts can be determined.
The benefits
“The Kepware solution helped us provide the productivity information about our assets and our process, so we could start making data driven decisions,” Aho says. “We could then easily provide consolidated data via mobile and desktop platforms to the people working on this customer project.
Overall, the Kepware solution has helped Linamar achieve the data collection standardisation that was the goal of the project. To date, 25% of the pilot facility’s machines (80) are linked with Kepware, especially on new machines equipped with built-in Ethernet connectivity. By the end of the year, it plans to have the Kepware solution live in more than half a dozen global facilities.
“I don’t know of a software company other than Kepware that is capable of doing what we needed to do on this project,” Aho says. “Kepware hit our OEE requirements out of the park.”
For more information contact Neil Upfold, eTX Data Services, +27 (0)83 325 4139, neilu@etx.co.za, www.kepware.co.za
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