Yuria-Pharm Improves OEE by 20% with Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM)

When the management of Yuria-Pharm expressed interest in manufacturing improvements, the team worked with Indusoft-Ukraine.

The main motivation was the following issues in the enterprise:

• The lack of full operational and dispatch control in realtime made it impossible to react quickly to stops and changes in production.
• It was necessary to establish continuous processes to increase production efficiency by achieving the planned productivity of production lines, minimizing the number and duration of downtime and increasing product quality, and minimizing the number of shortages.
• With a large number of different lines and machines, it was difficult to understand the details and causal links of equipment failures and deviations of process modes.
• People play a significant role in the consideration and processing of production data – a lot of data was entered by operators manually.
• As a result, different services had different interpretations of the information received and, accordingly, there was no trust in the reliability of the data. This, in turn, did not contribute to teamwork to improve KPIs.

"The lack of information on current offers or the cost of these systems is often troubled to meet these requirements. When we heard about the availability of such systems in our industry, we immediately organized a meeting with Indusoft-Ukraine, began discussions and joint development of a detailed Terms of Reference," continued Mr. Shevchuk.

The resulting system is designed to increase the efficiency of production of the company, increasing the efficiency of equipment use, its productivity, product quality, reducing downtime and material losses, improving the transparency of efficiency and quality of decisions. The goal is achieved by increasing the efficiency of process and production processes of the company, the transition from manual to automated mode of tracking the work of equipment and personnel in real-time and further analysis of the state of KPIs and causation, with appropriate recommendations for managers.

For the pilot project, the decision to implement the MOM system was made at the site of the plant Yuria-Pharm in Cherkasy, and which included 2 production lines: 1) production of drugs in glass bottles, 2) production of drugs in ampoules.

After the audit and specification of the terms of reference, five main objectives of the project were defined:

• Implementation of a full-fledged system of scheduling and calculation and control of OEE in the production in a real-time mode.

• Tracking real-time downtime, performance and materials. Provision of access to operational information for all personnel of the company.

• Automatic tracking of important production events by signals from automation systems.

• Automatic receipt of orders for the production of ERP products, tracking the production process of individual batches and products.

• Provision of display of data on the efficiency of equipment use through the calculation of OEE in the intranet of the company with access through browsers and mobile applications.

The solution has three levels. The first level – the level of local control and automation of process sections of the company, based on programmable logic controllers (PLC), operator panels (OP) and industrial computers (iPC), which perform the tasks of managing individual units and process sections. The purpose of the system at this level is to conduct the process. Within the project, the issue of data collection from the most important equipment of these local automation systems to the upper levels of real-time control was solved at this level.

The second level – the level of supervisory control, based on software and hardware of the process server of history and the computer of the dispatching workstation. The purpose of the system at this level is the automatic collection of real-time data, calculation of complex indicators, as well as the accumulation of production history. All important information from local equipment automation systems, automatic meters and terminals is stored in a single production data storage cell and provided to the dispatcher in a convenient and accessible form.

The third level – the level of analytics, based on the analytical server and the means of thin clients, which are involved in the implementation of tasks for the analysis of production data and are responsible for the efficiency of processes. The purpose of the system at this level is the visualization and analysis of production data.

Indusoft-Ukraine used the following from GE Digital:

• Analytical module Efficiency from the world-class MES software package, Proficy Plant Applications. It was used to create production models and identify production events of downtime, productivity losses, quality degradation, process alarms and product losses.
• Proficy Historian, best-in-class process historian archive of real-time data. It was used as an integration platform for automation systems (SCADA and others) and a tool for calculating current KPIs and their components.
• iFIX HMI/SCADA, also part of the Proficy family, as the software of the production management workstations.
• Production analytics display system based on a thin universal web client. It allows you to build a modern analytics display system using dashboard, customizable HTML5 and UAA technologies.
• Industrial Gateway Server(IGS) as a set of interfaces for access to production equipment management systems. ORS servers were used to connect to PLCs, operator panels and digital meters of products from different manufacturers.

• Launch of a modern, unified system of production scheduling with MOM functionality per Terms of Reference. The customer received scheduling, equipment monitoring and management of the main process modes, with advanced analysis of downtime and other deviations from process regulations.

• Significant improvement in key operating indicators – in particular, the improved OEE  indicator increased by 20%, particularly due to the reduction of productivity losses (by 70%) and downtime (by 80%).

• Qualitative changes in the production culture. In particular, the chief technology officers record a more responsible attitude of the plant's operators and technical services to the information from the dispatching system, which leads to more efficient and faster management decisions.

• A new level of flexibility and ability to respond to change. In the COVID-19 era, the capability of such a rapid response is ultimately reduced to the availability of certain functionality (such as remote monitoring –control, rapid reconfiguration of lines to new products, effective management of all KPIs, etc.) and training of plant personnel. The plant has reached a new level of production flexibility thanks to the new system.

• New knowledge and prospects for development. Accumulated experience and new knowledge allow us to see new perspectives. In particular, the management of Yuria-Pharm plans to scale the technical solutions obtained on 2 project lines to other sections of the plant. We are also talking about the unification of software solutions at the level of all production management.

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