1. Introduction
A leading supplier of materials and solutions into the basic services sector in southern Africa, PPC has 11 cement factories in South Africa, Botswana, DRC, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. PPC’s capacity is around eleven and a half million tonnes of cement products each year. PPC’s Materials business comprises of Pronto Readymix (including Ulula Ash) and 3Q Mahuma Concrete.
2. Problem
PPC required an enterprise-wide manufacturing reporting and information management solution to standardise KPI collection, calculation, and visualisation across all sites. The solution needed to implement PPC’s existing KPI standards to provide actionable, trustworthy information per site and per department, allowing responsible departmental managers to make better quality decisions more frequently.
3. Solution and Results
The Flow Information Platform was selected as the solution to solve PPC’s problem. It is designed to provide a single version of the truth, that one place to get information you can trust. PPC, in conjunction with Darner Engineering set about planning the KPI definition and dashboard standards that would be rolled out to PPC Cement SA’s three Mega Sites:
- PPC Slurry
- PPC De Hoek
- PPC Dwaalboom
Darner Engineering was then tasked to implement the solution at the above three sites.
The departments at each of these sites have now transitioned from using Excel to using Flow as their day-to-day KPI information and production management tool. Making it possible for anyone in the organisation to see, interpret and trust the information on the dashboards, from anywhere.
- 3 sites
- Approx. 8500 Measures per site
- Approx. 130 Events per site
- Data Sources:
– Canary Historian
– Laboratory Information Management System (SQL)
– Energy System (SQL)
– SAP (SQL)
– Wayware (SQL) - Approx. 60 Reports generated per site.
- SAP integration using SQL to publish shift production information to SAP once verified. Process orders are automatically assigned to bags produced by matching process order context with product selections on the SCADA.
- 50+ people per site are using Flow reports and dashboards daily.
