Challenge

One of the major challenges for an Automation Engineer in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) industry is to provide comprehensive, consistent data about the evolution of a process. This challenge was quite an issue a decade ago when data logs and proprietary databases took almost a day to provide an analysis for a 5-minute event. The solution that Danone needed was simple: A system to deal with real-time data acquisition, data storage and, of course, with trend displays. At that time, few providers could present a complete range of off-the-shelf products – and Matrikon was the best of them.

Solutions

Matrikon proposed an OPC solution that required minimal configuration and subsequent maintenance, permitting engineers to spend more of their working hours driving insights from the data and less time setting up the data management infrastructure.

Results

A firewall separates the server machine (running both the OPC Server for Modbus and OPC Desktop Historian) from the corporate intranet, while a second firewall allows only for Modbus port 502 to access process PLCs. Users retrieve archived data from the historian via the Matrikon OPC Tunneller. Today, the system continues to work in the Danone factory, with minimal maintenance, enabling users to access historical information from more than 15,000 tags.