Category: Life Science Industry

Case Study: FactoryTalk Batch Integration into a Control System for a Pharmaceutical Company

A large pharmaceutical company was commissioning and testing a new control system that was limited to providing only manual control of Equipment Modules.  In some cases, manual control of Phases was available, with these Phases operating as coordination Equipment Modules but not having the infrastructure capable of interacting with a standard sequencing engine.  To run Full Story

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Batch Forensics: Additional Report Parameters Enhance Process Performance

Understanding your process performance starts with having unambiguous data that is contextualized. This data provides information that quantifies and qualifies the different aspects that provide insight into the overall system performance. This data ends up in a repository and gets analyzed to produce actionable information and these reports may look at different aspects of the Full Story

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Batch Forensics: The Case of the FactoryTalk Batch Timers

Frequently, we hear new and seasoned engineers say they do not use the Rockwell FactoryTalk Batch (FTBatch) Standard timers ($timer) because they cannot interact with them or can’t tell what the timer’s status is, as they do with controller-based timers. However, our Batch Forensic experts explain that this is not the case. Standard Recipe timers Full Story

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Batch Forensics by ECS Solutions

The term forensics refers to the application of scientific knowledge to problems, especially scientific analysis, and data analysis of physical evidence.  In a plant environment, data and scientific analysis can be the key to discovering opportunities to improve the automation solution that exists, forensic tools can be implemented in all phases of the life cycle Full Story

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Documenting Your Manufacturing Ecosystem

Understanding your manufacturing ecosystem is one thing, but documenting it is just as important. Having extensive documentation of the manufacturing ecosystem, helps those who aren’t involved in daily, plant-floor operations make informed decisions. Your manufacturing ecosystem is the system you use for making your product(s), and fully documenting and understanding this ecosystem will help the Full Story

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The Benefits of Off-The-Shelf SOP Management Software

Being able to keep track of every step and every bit of data is a major necessity for every organization. An off-the-shelf standard operating procedure software is one way to implement new processes and keep track of business operating standards. Tracking manual operations in discrete, batch, and continuous manufacturing processes can greatly benefit from off-the-shelf Full Story

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The Importance of Material Tracing

Traceability on a processing or production line is incredibly important, especially when it comes to food products, where having the ability to track every ingredient down to the source is crucial to the health and safety of the consumers. As parts of the country begin to move out of COVID-19 shutdowns, we have been hearing Full Story

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Leveraging ISA-88 Standards for Discrete Manufacturing

Tracking manual discrete manufacturing processes can greatly benefit from off-the-shelf products. Often, discrete manufacturing processes requiring a high level of manual operator activities that rely on paper-based Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to specify how to manufacture their products. Operators are responsible to perform the tasks as specified by the SOP as well as capturing the Full Story

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Material Dosing Geneology

The Food industry uses batch manufacturing extensively and therefore requires traceability for material ingredients, i.e. the ability to follow the movement of a food product and its’ constituents all through the production process. This capability not only largely prevents unsafe foods from reaching the consumer but also improves product quality and efficiency in the event Full Story

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Securing your Intellectual Property

Production procedures and formula values property How secure is the intellectual property of your products? Many degrees of automation exist in manufacturing plants, but they all have a common requirement– specifying the activities and the order in which they need to occur as well as the key setpoints such as materials, amounts, tolerances, temperatures, durations, Full Story

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