Multotec: Utilities Optimised with Ignition

00:10
Speaker 1
The caveat with this one is that it’s not a single project; it’s a journey of projects.

00:17
Speaker 2
Yes. We haven’t imposed any limits on where we can apply ignition. And the ideas keep coming.

00:24
Speaker 1
Okay, all right, perfect. Let’s kick it off with introductions. We want to get to know the people behind the projects and the applications. An idea of the business. Renier, should we kick it off with you?

00:38
Speaker 3
Thank you, Jaco. Renier Van Rooyen. I’m the engineering executive at Multotec. Multotec is a manufacturer of products for the mining and mineral processing industry. Several of our customers are here, including Impala and Sibanye. Most of those individuals running large SCADA systems are customers, but we are the manufacturers of the products used in that industry.

01:04
Speaker 1
Oh, fantastic.

01:05
Speaker 2
Yeah. I’m CJ Barnard, one of the lead engineers at Advansys. Together with a large team, I have developed various projects within the Multotec space. And yeah, we have to keep up with Renier and the ideas that he has and try to make them a reality.

01:26
Speaker 3
If you can dream it, they can build it.

01:33
Speaker 1
Does it come down to a WhatsApp level? When I, when you get something on.

01:36
Speaker 2
WhatsApp, there has been WhatsApp. There have also been numerous video chats and similar activities. So.

01:41
Speaker 1
Okay, amazing. So, a little background about Multotec. You mentioned you have a couple of customers. Yeah. However, to give you an idea of the actual products you supply and the reach of the business.

01:53
Speaker 3
Yes. We were founded in South Africa approximately 50 years ago, starting with the founder, secretary, and a single person responsible for casting polyurethane panels. At that time, polyurethane panel screening was new to the market, and the business has grown over the last 50 years. We offer hundreds of different products, including various concentrator screening products. We produce a variety of products, including ceramic, rubber, polyurethane, stainless steel, and more. Our footprint is now global. We manufacture in Brazil, Chile, and Canada, with additional distribution in Africa, and a couple of offices. We manufacture in China, Germany and Australia. So the business has really grown. Let’s introduce a little bit about our project here.

02:46
Speaker 1
Yeah, sure.

02:46
Speaker 3
Or on the next slide. That’s actually. I’d like to talk to you. So for those. When I joined the company many moons ago in 1998, I didn’t really know much about mineral processing. But for those in the room who also don’t know much about mineral processing, there are the geologists. See the mineral in the ground; you and I see a mountain, and then that mountain is usually mined. The ore is then ground into finer particles, and the process begins. It’s extracting minerals, whether they are coal, diamonds, gold, or platinum. As part of our exco pack, we include the periodic table for those of you who had science in school. A periodic table lists all the elements, and we typically have a gauge for each aspect of what the market is doing.

03:35
Speaker 3
This is a sample of a typical mineral processing plant, with everything green indicating products manufactured by Multotec. There is a range of products that help our customers lower the cost of producing their products. That’s typically what a minimal processing plant would look like. And yeah, that’s a bit about our project; CJ can introduce it.

04:01
Speaker 2
Yeah. As you can see, Multotec actually delivers or manufactures various products from multiple sites across the country. Most of the sites are based in Kempton Park and Spartan. And so, you have a lot of different things, but we’d like all of them to share a common platform when we do SCADA with them. The architecture we have in place involves connecting the solution to a group network that services the various organisations or business units within the group. From there, we can have our Ignition gateway. We host multiple types of projects here. So what we’ll show you today are some of those projects. You’ll see that we monitor 25 facilities in terms of energy, where we have integrations with power meters or deep-sea controllers on generators.

04:58
Speaker 2
We have solar systems and also Shelly switches, so that if Renier wants to make someone’s life uncomfortable, he can set off their alarm or shut down their air conditioning from his phone. However, at the same time, in the manufacturing space, Multotec is not conventionally a plant that requires a SCADA in the sense that it manufactures discrete components using OEM machines. However, by introducing Ignition, we could have an inherited structure that allows us to use the same type of templates and project components across different machines that perform discrete manufacturing. This would also enable us to sync that data up into dashboards and reporting structures that the group can utilise to benefit from.

05:45
Speaker 1
Looking at the architecture, you have a gateway, not a redundant gateway, with redundancy as well. You’ve got the gateway, you feed that into, I would imagine a couple of SQL databases, you have a canary data historian, long term data over there, you have some flow software there, Eskom support for Those that don’t know there is a resource called Ignition Exchange where there are over 500 resources available that you could use for free inside of Ignition. Eskom-Se-Push was naturally a very popular one a couple of years ago. Not so much right now, but that can change right now as we speak. And there are also multiple other ones. There are a couple of others that are really popular. The Track is now a ticket management system. It’s all the resources that have been developed by the community that are available for free.

06:35
Speaker 1
And Dhiren actually developed Eskom-Se-Push from Advansys.

06:39
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, so he’s one of our colleagues. Yeah.

06:41
Speaker 1
So that’s a popular one. So. Additionally, there is the underlying infrastructure across the facilities, as well as the rubber manufacturing site. Okay. And the Oracle, the J.D. Edwards integration, is currently live?

06:55
Speaker 3
Yes, and that was a significant component of the project, especially the project in the rubber press shop. So we. One of our product ranges is compression-moulded rubber products, and there are a couple of rubber presses. These presses are typical, operating with a PLC. And the requirement was to feed ERP data to the operator. So, on an HMI, you can see that this is the job I’m currently working on. You can view job information, including the customer’s details and important dimensions. And he can also see progress because before that, it was just like a little ice cream truck; you know, you make the next ice cream. However, with that, he can see the countdown, and you can start tracking how far he is with the job.

07:42
Speaker 3
And if a specific item failed the quality control, it would be added back to the work order quantity, so that he knows I need to make one more. The integration with our ERP system, Oracle JDE, is a real highlight of this. It’s exciting to know that now, for future projects, this has been tamed, and we can also write back to JD. So, if the material consumption, let’s say on a large scale, is then fed back into the ERP. Before we had that, we used a super back flush or the back flush of material because it’s not easy to tally up the material consumed on each work order.

08:31
Speaker 1
Fantastic.

08:34
Speaker 2
So I can take us through these slides. As Renier has been saying, one of the things we wanted to achieve is to get the ERP information to the operators on the floor. However, you actually want to obtain that information with the full context. Having just the Order number, the works order, or the process order is not sufficient. You want to know the metadata around the order. And what’s quite nice about the way Ignition works is that we can integrate directly through the API that JDE provides to get that information into the ERP. So we didn’t have to have a staging database between ourselves. We could do that directly. Some of the challenges we faced were significant.

09:17
Speaker 2
The discrete manufacturing sector utilises various machines with different standards and at varying stages of maturity. Therefore, we had to adapt our approach in the SCADA to accommodate machines that weren’t necessarily built or commissioned at the same time. And then what we’ll find is when we go to the next slide, we’ll. It’s two slides away. However, when we discussed things related to that, I may address it later. This view you see over here is a shop floor view of the Multotec Rubber Press shop. So, each of those coloured tiles represents one of the presses that we’ve integrated. We have used the solution to track OEE-related information, allowing us to monitor downtime.

10:08
Speaker 2
However, there is something quite neat, and I know the engineers responsible for this, as well as the supervisors responsible for monitoring how the production facility operates. The table shown at the bottom left essentially displays a time study of what the machine spent most of its time doing. And in that way, you can gain straightforward insights into where the opportunities are to optimise something or improve. Yes, because you want to get the thing done to work. You don’t want to sit idle and open. And these types of integrated reports are served by the Flow software. So, it’s a third-party application that we’ve integrated directly here, but at the same time, we can browse our local history.

10:57
Speaker 2
At some point in the video, you’ll see that we’ve embedded the Axiom Trend client directly into the Ignition application. And what you’ll see is that the Trend client is also pre-populated with the tags that are focused on the area that we’re looking at. As you go to each machine, the tags presented in the Axiom client will be those of the machine.

11:20
Speaker 1
Axiom screens.

11:22
Speaker 2
Well, there it is. Yeah. This is the console that the operator sees. So you’ll know that he can go through the schedule. So, what was scheduled for the work? To order the work centre from the ERP, you can see the metadata and select the job. If there is any configuration-related information, you can append it.

Additionally, serving as metadata, if you’ve made any changes to the schedule, you can also provide a reason for the change. Typically, what would happen is that you’d schedule a job to work on one machine. It can’t be run there because the machine is down. We needed to move it to another machine, and then we’ll be able to trace the reasons why something like that would happen. Yes, we can proceed.

12:12
Speaker 2
Alright, this is one of our more recent projects. Renier was discussing how we write back into JD. One of the things we want to address for the team at Multotec Rubber is helping them understand how much rubber they have consumed to manufacture the finished product. There is a single scale over which all the raw materials move. However, now we can do something else: as we move across that scale, there is literally only one scale. We’ve developed this interface to serve as a user interface for the operator at scale. And then you can capture and assign weights that are allocated to a machine and a work order in a way that allows us also to track the accuracy of the drawings and costing per part being made.

13:00
Speaker 2
So, suppose the ERP indicates that we only need to use 50kg of a typical compound to manufacture something, but the operators on the floor know that we actually need to use 52kg. In that case, that information can be passed up and fed into the materials balancing. Yes.

13:15
Speaker 1
Okay. Very, very nice.

13:17
Speaker 3
It’s also accounting for scrap or waste, because that’s sometimes something you can’t control.

13:22
Speaker 1
Yeah.

13:23
Speaker 3
By using actual material consumption, you can correlate it with your plant material, which helps you analyse your variances.

13:34
Speaker 2
Yeah. So. All right, cool. So you’ve moved us on to the facilities monitoring. I know this is a passion project for a niche. I’ll I’ll have him talk a bit.

13:41
Speaker 3
About this one interesting project. A couple of years ago, when we experienced widespread load shedding, Equity had an incentive, almost a directive, for the Spartan area. If we could reduce our loads during load shedding by 30%, they would not completely switch us off. So, the whole community tried to work together to say, ‘Can we control our loads so they don’t get switched off?’ And this is where this project started. And we said, well, there’s a person in this room who often likes to say to measure is to know. And we said, well, how can we achieve a 30% reduction if you don’t have a measurement of before and after your efforts? This is when the project began.

14:33
Speaker 1
And this is a project completely separate from the one we’ve just been through.

14:37
Speaker 2
Yes. And it’s hosted on the same gateway.

14:39
Speaker 1
On the same gateway?

14:40
Speaker 2
Yeah.

14:40
Speaker 1
Okay.

14:41
Speaker 3
We actually have a trifle of projects on the same gateway. I mean, there’s the energy project. There are rubber pressure projects, and within our injection-moulded thermal polyurethane, we have a project, as well as some others in the pipeline. We began this journey by installing ACCU meters. There are accurate meters at each of our 25 properties to monitor the energy we import. We also have solar systems on many of the properties. So, we wanted to see what comes from solar energy. And then about 19 generators that also need to be wired up. So you want to see where your energy comes from.

15:28
Speaker 3
And that was an eventful journey to get the sources of energy into Ignition, because we can write doctoral papers on CTs, you know, current transformers, because they were in the wrong places in the wrong direction. And at one stage, we even realised that the CT was installed in a place where, when our generator runs, the town council charges us for that energy. You know, so. Well, and you can’t go to them and say, ‘ Listen, this came from the generator. ‘ You know, so it’s an exciting project to start measuring our energy.

16:14
Speaker 1
Yeah.

16:14
Speaker 3
Patterns. We have also decided that, if you need to curtail loads, you need to be able to turn off non-discretionary loads, such as air conditioners and possibly heating systems.

16:28
Speaker 1
But without the visibility. How would you know?

16:30
Speaker 3
How would you know? And that’s where our Shelly switch journey started. I don’t know how many. We installed about 600 pictures. They’re all on the network down to.

16:38
Speaker 1
What kind of level physically? And well, there you go.

16:41
Speaker 3
There, you can see on the screen that we’re looking at a property now.

16:45
Speaker 1
Oh, all the offices.

16:46
Speaker 2
Yeah.

16:46
Speaker 3
And then every office. There’s a line about an air conditioner in that office, and you can see it.

16:50
Speaker 1
Really can put somebody in the hot seat.

16:53
Speaker 3
You can. If a meeting goes on too long, I can turn off the air conditioning from my laptop, which tends to speed up the meeting. You know, so there’s an image of what a property view would look like. You can see what comes in from the grid there. I’ll be exporting there. There’s what’s coming in from solar on that plant—Hydro, boilers, geezers, the generator there. You can see the fuel level at 72% engine block temperature because all of them have heated blocks. I don’t see a reading on this one. And that was a game-changer for us as well. With 19 generators and sometimes cable faults in the area, or with load shedding to ensure they don’t run out of diesel, it’s almost. That’s a work of art. And this is helping us with that.

17:46
Speaker 3
It’s now also available on our mobile app, and our properties manager, Marius, uses it to monitor diesel levels. That’s the mobile app there. And to understand where the hotspots are in terms of. Of diesel supply.

18:02
Speaker 1
And. And this is using the app. It’s not a. It’s not a page on a browser or on a phone. It’s using the app.

18:08
Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s using the app itself. Yeah.

18:09
Speaker 1
Okay. All right, very nice.

18:14
Speaker 2
So maybe to. To return to the previous slide, you’ll see that we have a. Is this the video that’s played automatically?

18:24
Speaker 1
It is that one.

18:25
Speaker 2
All right, cool. So, you’ll see that each of those green tiles represents one of the buildings owned by Multotec. They’re in the Kempton Park area. And those three at the bottom are in remote locations, such as Pretoria and Benoni. And depending on which sort of perspective you take on the site, you get to see what the grid supply is, what the solar supply is, if it has, and so on. And then what you’ll see. I’m not sure when the video will be transferred, but we currently have a breadcrumb navigation at the top. So you can then navigate to almost treating their sort of group as an S95 implementation. You can then go to the street you want to see and proceed to the physical address on that street.

19:13
Speaker 2
We can also see which items are busy feeding into or drawing from that system through the visualisation we’ve created. So, we haven’t opted for grey; we’ve decided on pretty. No, but. But to be fair, we. We do try to minimise. So not to. To use colour gratuitously, but then also to highlight with colour things that deviate. So we’ll. You’ll see instead of having a grey-white palette. We chose a grey-green palette. Yeah. To avoid adding too much visual clutter to the information we see.

19:53
Speaker 1
Fits nicely with your corporate identity.

19:55
Speaker 3
Multi tech green. Yeah. So the RGB colours 128.0.0. No, it’s simple, while it’s playing at the right top, you can see the feed from Eskom Sub Push. That’s quite nice, as it allows you to see the time slots and the weather during load shedding.

20:13
Speaker 1
The API call that it gets.

20:16
Speaker 3
And you also see that in that slot, we are generating 1.3 megawatts of solar energy. And that gives you just a glimpse of the energy graphing.

20:27
Speaker 1
Lovely. What’s next?

20:32
Speaker 3
There was a slide on Click. Is that still coming?

20:34
Speaker 1
Oh, I did see.

20:38
Speaker 3
Or did we lose that one?

20:39
Speaker 2
I don’t know. Jaco might have culled.

20:42
Speaker 3
Okay. It’s because of time.

20:44
Speaker 1
We’re only about four hours over time. I mean.

20:49
Speaker 2
Okay. But I think maybe just to Prelude. Renier, you can still tell us about that. So one of the. So I think a lot of businesses would probably use something like Power BI to sort of leverage their data that’s being stored by the historian or by some MIS system. In the case of Multotec, you use QlikView, and the data served by Ignition, Canary, and Flow actually feeds into these business systems, which you can then display.

21:20
Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s used quite pervasively across your business.

21:24
Speaker 3
Yes. That’s our BI layer within the organisation. And because we have skills in Click development, it was easy to connect to the. To the energy data from Ignition. And with Click, it’s now easy because it’s in-memory analytics. You can look at a property, and we can look at the time of day that is our peak. Where are our peaks? What areas got the peak? What’s happening to solar? What’s the ratio of solar to? To import energy? And then you learn a great deal about yourself—your energy behaviour.

21:56
Speaker 1
Absolutely. Yeah.

21:59
Speaker 2
Yeah, sure. I’ll continue with what’s next. Something’s been culled. I see ellipses are being used to redact.

22:09
Speaker 1
That was on purpose.

22:10
Speaker 2
No, I think we. But that doesn’t matter. We can talk. I mean, with the ellipses, I can carry on for eight hours if I must and just keep you. All right. So, with the mobile apps, what we’d like to see is that you’ve been using PowerApps, and we’d like to see how we can utilise Ignition that’s connected to data coming from physical devices in real-time to deliver more. I think one of the concepts discussed earlier is how data can be democratised. So, typically, people who aren’t necessarily going to be interfacing with a machine or a SCADA system, how can we get their inputs into the broader digital ecosystem in terms of data?

22:55
Speaker 1
So manual. Manual data, yes. Yeah.

22:57
Speaker 3
Shop floor data that’s collected.

22:59
Speaker 1
Yeah. Typically, they are found on clipboards, walking around. Perfect.

23:02
Speaker 2
Yeah.

23:03
Speaker 1
The new forms functionality may be a nice new project.

23:06
Speaker 2
Exactly, yeah.

23:07
Speaker 3
We would also like to start leveraging PLC data into our quality control processes. This is because if you can collect temperatures and pressures from your manufacturing equipment and incorporate them into your release certificates, then at least the process is controlled, which contributes to consistent quality.

23:32
Speaker 2
Yeah.

23:33
Speaker 3
That’s also a project on the.

23:34
Speaker 2
And what Kyle and Ken showed about the. It’s like the golden batch that we can show; that’s actually quite exciting because then, for every machine, we can have a golden cycle. That’s something I need to look into.

23:48
Speaker 1
You can have the ideal measurement against. Yeah, fantastic. There is no end date for this one. It’s a journey that’s continuing. Amazing projects already. We’ve reviewed two of the items you’ve submitted. It would be nice to get a view of the other ones. But that’s amazing. Well done. Lovely, lovely work. Any questions for Ranier or. There’s a question back there, Richard.

24:12
Speaker 3
Curious. How do you quantify the benefits you’ve got so far?

24:17
Speaker 1
Quantify the benefits?

24:21
Speaker 3
Not really quantified in Rands and Cents, as I mentioned. For example, the benefits are that if a generator runs dry, you won’t know that you’ve lost production. So, we’ve already saved on production losses. In the press shop, it’s a productivity benefit because there’s more real-time feedback to the operators. So we saw an increase in productivity. However, in the press shop, we are now creating a dashboard for management to review efficiency. We’re at the phase where we can now start analysing why this is the utilisation of the press shop, or what our plant downtime or maintenance time is as a ratio of available time. We will now start acting on that data.

25:13
Speaker 1
Good question. Any other questions? Another question? Yeah.

25:24
Speaker 4
Sorry, Renier. We’re actually neighbours in Spartan. I’m on Derrick Road. I would like to know from you which ERP system you are using, specifically Oracle.

25:34
Speaker 3
JD Edwards, okay, JDE. We’ll call it JDE.

25:37
Speaker 4
We use SAP and also have manufacturing plants. So my question to you is, you said that you can report consumption back into your ERP system. Can you also pull recipes from your ERP into Ignition?

25:55
Speaker 3
Yes. In one of our projects, where polyurethane is spun to mix different components and produce polyurethane, as well as other shore hardnesses and compounds in various ratios, Ignition can read that information from the ERP. So JD has got the restful APIs, which are easy to connect to, and Ignition can also connect to those APIs easily. Security is not a problem because you can control it through your API. Therefore, Ignition can only read specific fields and data, and also upload data only under certain conditions. So, the reading from us was our first phase, and we were comfortable with that. However, we are now writing back specific transactions. Perfect.

26:49
Speaker 1
Thank you.