Conair Group: In control
Every three years since 1963, US-based auxiliary equipment producer for plastics processing Conair Group anticipates putting on a big show at NPE in Orlando, Florida. This year, however, the group has had to adapt to the challenges preventing everyone from attending such events, so the experts hosted a digital press conference to show and tell their latest Industry 4.0-based innovations. EPPM was there.
“Had there been an NPE 2021,” began VP Sales and Marketing Sam Rajkovich, “the theme of the Conair booth would have been centred around the word ‘control’. Three years ago, we introduced our SmartServices cloud-based Industry 4.0 solution for central monitoring and control of auxiliary equipment.”
The company has made what Rajkovich described as “great strides” in implementing that technology, and one such control initiative is now in effect: Conair has introduced a common control platform and user interface in several products. This will be applied to all Conair equipment that relies on POC-based controls. This common or universal control gives users consistency regardless of the type of machine they're operating. It was first implemented in the new SmartFLX material handling control, which was introduced in January and is now available on Conair’s blenders and temperature control units (TCUs), with dryers becoming available later this year and chillers and other equipment to follow.
Control 4.0
Two other systems, wave conveying and a new RFID-proofed resin selection system, are also controlled through the SmartFLX platform. To explain why this is significant, Matt Shope, Conair’s Director of Engineering, said: “No one else in the industry has attempted to do this, so why did Conair need a common or universal control? We're getting a lot of feedback from our customers that employee turnover was a major issue and the training required to get employees up to speed on new equipment was really hampering them. Managing change in control technologies was a real challenge for everyone, including Conair, and moving to a common platform minimises the risk and effort required. We've heard from a lot of our customers and industry partners that they're ready to embrace Industry 4.0 and are looking for easier solutions.”
Developing this common control platform was a major project for the Conair engineering team, taking almost two years to complete. The two major components to this project are the HMI design, or user interface, and the hardware piece, that is the POC, the touch screen itself, and all the associated input/output (I/O) and communications. “Some of our goals when we were designing the new HMI were that we wanted to make it more intuitive,” Shope continued. “We wanted to have a common user experience to help our customers reduce training time and increase operator efficiency, and we wanted to make the most important information in settings visible immediately, that is as soon as the user walks up to the machine. To accomplish that, we worked with an industrial design firm to create a new controls architecture from the ground up.”
There followed a series of consultations with customers, salespeople, service partners, engineers, and all key stakeholders. Once their requirements were understood, many iterations that determine the final HMI design guide were prototyped. Among the key considerations was that of user interface best practises such as button size and text size across the different display sizes. For Conair, these range from 4.3 to 15 inches because blender controls, for example, need to display more information than the HMI on a TCU. Conair engineers, led by Shope, essentially came up with a common place for all the different elements so that they are interchangeable across all display sizes and equipment types.
European connection
The hardware-related challenges were met by working alongside Austria-based automation specialist B&R Automation to integrate its fully scalable, flexible hardware portfolio, and to enable the machine application and the performance of the machine to determine the exact hardware it needs. All the I/O are interchangeable and uses the same software platform to program, further minimising the risk that comes with implementing new technologies and protocols.
It’s all with the aim of streamlining process control, as Shope concluded: “It streamlines service, streamlines spare parts, maintenance, and our service people only have to learn one control platform to allow them to solve problems.”
In short, it has now become easier to connect to Conair SmartServices, which enables powerful reporting monitoring and remote control.
Continuing with the theme of control, specifically in the domain of equipment monitoring and remote-control systems, including the plastics industry's drive to embrace industry 4.0, SmartServices Project Leader Alan Landers introduced four additional enhancements to the SmartServices web-based platform.
“There's been a lot of talk in the last few years about Industry 4.0,” Landers said. “Some is real, and some is just hype, but we truly believe that with SmartServices we can begin to help our customers realise that vision for the future.”
Automation evolution
As Industry 3.0 brought computerisation to equipment, Industry 4.0 is bringing data standardisation, which is seen as essential to predictive analytics, machine connectivity, and machine learning. Businesses that are loathe to embrace the evolution could thereby be creating their own obstacles.
“Routine exchange of standardised equipment data,” Landers added, “is a basic element of Industry 4.0. However, the protocol for data standardisation, OPC UA, is only now being created for plastics machinery controls, so wide-scale adoption by processors is not yet possible. To bridge this gap and enable the organised presentation of data from auxiliaries not necessarily built by Conair, the SmartServices team performs its own custom integration works, which involves reading the data streams of other auxiliary controls that use Modbus or other common industry protocols, pulling out relevant data and integrating it with real-time data from similar auxiliaries for presentation. Until OPC UA is widely adopted, this integration work is essential to processing varied auxiliary equipment data into neat trend lines, statistical displays, KPIs and clickable features that can help predict or prevent problems and proactively develop greater uptime and increased productivity and profitability.”
As Conair aims to make SmartServices an integral industry 4.0 tool, the group continues to focus on the fact that it needs to be both valuable and usable in the short-term. For that reason, Landers has helped implement four new features that enhance usability and address customer needs. First among these new features enables plastics processors to name and organise equipment and equipment groups within SmartServices in any way they choose, whether by plant, by process, by line, or by equipment type in order to save time when creating scans of performance trends, KPIs, maintenance alerts, or priority alarms within an equipment grouping. If additional details are required, processors can investigate by scanning through sub-groups such as dryers, auxiliaries that service a specific production line, and all TCUs that are due for preventative maintenance.
“Secondly,” Landers continued, “we're expanding on the KPI functionality. Instead of displaying a default set of three KPIs for each machine type, SmartServices now allows the user to self-rank the order of all KPIs for at-a-glance monitoring. This makes it even easier for processors to get a real-time view of how their equipment is operating relative to critical standards and set points, then in real-time or in historical reports, these KPIs help them identify ways to maintain and improve process efficiency and quality.”
A third new feature, delivered in combination with blender data logging, simplifies inventory management and production versus scrap calculations by tracking and storing resin usage and providing on-demand or schedule usage reports by blender or by resin name. This function previously required a significant amount of user programming. What's new is the fact that these functions are now integrated into the SmartServices platform which automatically performs all software and hardware server-related installation and maintenance of the data. SmartServices receives the total information from each blender and stores this data in the cloud just like any KPI or other measurement. The user can then run the resin reports.
Finally, the fourth new development is in the machine control interface feature, which allows users to connect with controls on the plant floor through the SmartServices dashboard and make adjustments as if they were standing in front of the machine. A production supervisor or maintenance chief will therefore require no extra training on how to use several different control interfaces. “They all have the same look and feel,” Landers concluded, “so I think you can see just how valuable SmartServices can be for processors in both the short- and long-term.”