Smithfield Foods

Manufacturing Intelligence

Smithfield Foods in Wilson, NC is the largest bacon processing and packaging facility in the world. They also have locations throughout the United States processing various pork products.

The manufacturing floor consists primarily of several independent OEM provided equipment pieced together that processes and packages the product. At the end of the line a final system captures product data and archives the product information in a local database.

Smithfield asked Hallam-ICS to configure a SCADA system using Ignition to display real time Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) information for the manufacturing floor and to provide regular reports showing production results for each shift. The project required the following expertise:

• Industrial networking
• Ignition SCADA programming
• Rockwell PLC programming
• Microsoft SQL database programming
• MySQL database programming suspect data

The SCADA system was required to:

• Interface with multiple OEM provided equipment to monitor and aggregate production performance data such as throughput, stops, causes for maintenance, and yield.
• The HMI SCADA presented the real-time production data on a large display on the manufacturing floor in reference to shift goals.

The HMI SCADA system archived production data to be used in the following reports:

• Downtime Events
• Daily and shift yields
• Historical trends
• Total Uptime
• Throughput

The project required the use of the following Ignition modules and skills:

• Archive historical data in a MySQL database.
• Ability to retrieve data from a third-party Microsoft SQL database.
• Transaction groups to aggregate data into useful information.
• Report module programming to draft the reports and email the reports in PDF format to a specified list of users on a regular schedule.
• Create a tag database from the various OEM equipment using Rockwell PLCs.
• HMI Vision Module with templates and tag database programming to create the required dashboards.
• Custom Python scripting modules to organize and aggregate data from various sources.