Category: Metals

Five Ways to Increase Your Automation Game via Controls Migration Without Decreasing Employee Morale

In the industrial manufacturing sector, the term “automation” often raises concerns about job security. However, when done properly, modernizing your facility is more about empowering your workforce than replacing them. By implementing a strategic controls migration, you can enhance your processing capabilities to meet your company’s goals without harming team morale. A successful migration shifts Full Story

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Normalizing Material Delivery – Dry Ingredients

Batch recipes are often created considering a fixed amount of dry ingredients and liquids. Many dry products used in recipes are moist, featuring a measured amount of dry products and water. This poses a challenge for batch operators who mix the ingredients using assumed ingredient quantities and qualities. Source vessels hold ingredients, the properties of Full Story

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The Top Five Benefits of Tuning PID Loops in Process Control Systems

Process control systems are the backbone of efficient and reliable manufacturing operations, ensuring predictability, stability, and optimized performance across various industries. Whether managing the precise control of temperatures, pressures, or flow rates, these systems play a vital role in delivering consistent output, reducing waste, and upholding safety standards. At the heart of many process control Full Story

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Large Scale SCADA Migration using Ignition coupled with the Perspective Module

ECS Solutions, Inc., recently completed a large-scale SCADA migration for a fortune 500 food manufacturing client.  This upgrade was noteworthy based on the size of the facility-wide project and the fact that it was executed using Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform coupled with the Perspective visualization module as the basis of design.  This client has embarked Full Story

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Manual Ingredient Additions – Confirmation and Tracking

ECS Solutions, Inc. (ECS), worked with a world leader in nutritional products to tie together the most critical software tools used in their dry ingredient manufacturing.  This project merged the capabilities of the existing inventory tracking system with the robust batch processing capabilities in the company’s final assembly area. The client’s existing inventory management system Full Story

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Embedded Engineers as Trusted Advisors

The legacy walls between areas and disciplines inside of a manufacturing plant have melted away, leaving behind a complex, inter-woven tapestry of interconnected workers and departments.  The speed at which technology advances inside of plants would make it nearly impossible for most organizations to support all systems via internal personnel.  The internal support teams of Full Story

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Benefits of a Campaign Manager

Batch processing facilitates the repetitive, tightly controlled manufacture of many things.  This type of operation is ideal for large scale manufacturing where products are assembled and modified in a series of stages or steps.  When connected to a batch management software system, the number of ingredients, execution stages, and degree of processing complexity which can 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 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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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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