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PROJECT New Factory Provides an Opportunity for a New Approach: |
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It isn't very often that a major manufacturer has the opportunity to plan a new manufacturing facility starting with a clean sheet of paper. Visy Board's new corrugated cardboard packaging plant in Dandenong in Victoria presented just such an opportunity. The plant is based on J.I.T. principals achieved through the integration of disparate factory equipment with back-office logistics systems. The process of turning thousands of tonnes of paper into a wide range of cardboard containers requires a number of stages, utilising a variety of machines from different suppliers. Paper is first processed into cardboard, corrugated and slit by a machine called a corrugator. Stacks of slit card are ejected onto a conveyor system and then onto trolleys for delivery to the finishing system. The finishing system folds, glues and prints the card to produce the final product, which is then transferred to a palletiser. A logistics system schedules production, with data from these schedules used to determine the operation of each factory floor sub-system. At the Dandenong plant, communication between factory equipment uses a system called BoxNET. This is a standard based on MAP (manufacturing automation protocol) and adapted for use in the paper industry. System integration for this project entailed the implementation of communication links between the factory equipment, logistics system and BoxNET. CSE Technology's Factory Window provides the basis for implementation of all these links. Factory Window, operating on standard PCs in a Windows environment, has a large library of device drivers, supporting a wide variety of standard communication protocols and those specific to factory floor equipment. In addition, there is an application-programming interface, which simplifies the transfer of data between factory floor equipment and custom applications. At Dandenong, three Factory Window systems are used. Two systems provide the interface between the logistics system and the Witron corrugator to supply production-scheduling data. They also implement an interface between the Witron corrugator and the BoxNET network that enables data derived from the Witron operations to control the first stage of a Pentek conveyor / trolley system. The third Factory Window system provides the primary BoxNET interface for the logistics system. It converts logistics data into the appropriate BoxNET format for the Pentek conveyor / trolley systems and transfers data derived from the finishing equipment to the logistics system. Visy Board's approach to plant integration is based on all equipment being able to transfer appropriate data between each other and management computers. They are confident that this leads to a marked improvement in plant efficiency. In the never ending quest for improvements in manufacturing there is little doubt that many more Australian companies will adopt this approach in the future. |
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