Sterlite Technologies Limited's: Achieving Operational Efficiency through An Online Shopfloor-Online

A solution that has integrated all PLCs with SCADA systems to collate rich information for real-time analysis thereby improving processes and solving complex problems

Sterlite Technologies Limited develops and delivers products, solutions and infrastructure for telecom and power transmission networks. It is a multinational product based company that sells and repair optical fiber, fiber optic cables, power conductors and HV / EHV Power Cables through its operations in India, China and Brazil.

The Bone of Contention

The company wanted to achieve operational goals that was possible by collating and bringing rich information jointly on a single common platform. Prasanth Puliakottu, CIO, Sterlite Technologies Ltd. carried out a state of the art IT solution ‘Shopfloor Online’, which would provide tremendous value in analyzing the real time and historical performance of the manufacturing processes. The idea was to have a proactive approach for analyzing processes so that they could be improved, and to be able to quickly discover inefficiencies in the system and resolve them before they caused failures.

Solution

Shopfloor Online is an intelligent platform and a powerful enterprise-wide data historian that collects, archives and distributes tremendous volumes of real time production information at extremely high-speeds. It also improves visibility, and provides context to raw data by aggregating vast information that ultimately results in achieving better, faster decisions and increased productivity.

RTIP & Historian Analytics are used in this project, which are top-notch online process control systems. It captures both process parameters data and product online test data simultaneously, whilst also creating statistically powered data analysis & empowering team to increase process capabilities.

The key outcomes of the solution are it helps with Continuous process improvement, automatic performance data acquisition in real-time, SPC, Quality Analysis and an alarming summary. Overall, the solution assures that its users get better process visibility and Real time control of operational parameters.

Tech Used

Prasanth and team interfaced all standalone PLCs on the shopfloor to a data concentrator and integrated the PLCs to the plant network through a gateway. The concentrator then fetches data from the PLCs and feeds it to an App Server called CIMPLICITY, which is a client/server based HMI/SCADA solution. All servers are running on a Virtualized Platform.

Aggregating data from the shopfloor and analyzing it to discover inefficiencies and resolving causes of failure. As usage of technology like this has a direct impact on the business, our jury decided to confer the Business Tech Leader award to Prasanth.