Etablissements Lucien: a winning association between supervision software and MES

Etablissements Lucien is a family company specializing in two major businesses: meat cutting and producing delicatessen products. With a production site located in Beauvais (60), the plant includes a covered production area of 11,000m² and hosts 270 staff, for a revenue of 53 Million Euros.

Modernizing the supervision system while creating a link with an ERP system

The project originated from a simple observation’, commented Mr. BENATAR, Information Systems Manager: “The heart of the process – delicatessen transformation – used an ageing supervision system, rather rigid in terms of communication with controllers, and without any link with ERP”.
 

The manufacturing orders (MOs) generated on the ERP were written again by the operators and entered manually in each production workshop, with all related sources of error. Manufacturing batch launching was basic, particularly for entering quantities to produce or monitoring the status of a production workshop.
 

This required the design of a new open and centralized multi-operator and multi-controller system, in order to:

• limit manual operations as much as possible (re-entry)
• have a global real-time vision of the production status
• ensure data logging and flawless traceability of MOs
   

The project also required to maintain two systems, i.e. ERP and MES/supervision, separate and self-standing, while allowing to exchange data. Topkapi allowed to meet all these goals: with its OWSQL component, it reads automatically in real time – using stored procedures – the MOs (data tables) listed in the ERP Oracle databases, to integrate them to its own real-time database, and display them for the operator in the form of selection screens.

 
The latter then selects an MO, allocates it to a production workshop, selects the quantity to produce, the associated controller program, then launches the manufacturing batch under control of the controller and supervision. All batch parameters (time, temperatures …) recorded during manufacturing are logged in specific data tables (formats initially specified by Ets Lucien) of a PostgreSQL base. This second base, specific to the Topkapi MES application, will be used in a future data analysis software package. The cooking workshop was the pilot unit for the first phase in the system’s deployment.

 
Support from one end of the project to the other by AREAL

AREAL helped Ets Lucien’s computer and automation engineers to configure the application within a skill transfer operation on Topkapi during this phase.
 

The application was then deployed by trained staff to the entire process – pot, scalding, cooling, pasteurization – providing real-time global vision of the entire manufacturing process, as well as perfect batch traceability. Supervision will also be extended to the entire plant to use Topkapi’s standard functions, particularly automation control and alarms management with automatic transmission by email.
 

This tool was perfectly accepted by the operators having participated in the project from the start. This more particularly by the quality department which can now, from their desks via a simple Topkapi Open Client, check and analyze the manufacturing parameters of each batch, without going to the production workshops: a true revolution !