Have you Ampla information
November 1st 2005 Ian Clay attended Citect's launch of the new Ampla suite of Manufacturing Execution Systems
"Global manufacturers rely on Citect" says Jeremy Bolton, Ampla's sales and marketing manager before reeling off an impressive list of customers including names such as BMW, Nestlé and even NASA. "All companies that have SCADA and PLC's have access to a great deal of information which they need to get out and get at." This is why the company has launched its Ampla suite of products to help manufacturers gain access to the data available to them and analyse it. A secondary but connected reason is that as Jeremy says "In most businesses you've got the industry on one hand and the business on the other and never the twain shall meet." In other words, as we have seen time and time again there is a lack of communication between the shopfloor and the management. Ampla it is claimed can help bridge that gap.
A suite of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Ampla allows users to improve production efficiency, performance and profitability. This is achieved by processing, analysing and presenting real time intelligence from across a business.
This allows corporate, IT, plant and production managers to make faster and 'better' decisions based on accurate and current information.
Ampla is a suite of customisable analysis modules that target specific areas for business improvement. These modules include production; quality; tracking; downtime; cost; maintenance; knowledge; planning and metrics. Ampla connects to multiple plant and business systems, collects the relevant data and presents it in easy to understand, real time intelligence for productivity analysis, data mining, querying and reporting. Managers can select the information they need to take action and make continuous production efficiency improvements. For example it is possible to drill down to identify bottle necks to production, inhibitors to quality and root causes of delay.
A powerful advantage of Ampla is that it answers what are seen as the traditional complaints associated with ERP/MES systems, namely that they are expensive to specify due to their customised and bespoke nature and that because of this they are equally expensive to maintain and change. Citect's Jeremy Bolton insists Ampla is an "Out of the box" solution that is simple to configure, change and use.
The power of OEE
The philosophy behind the Ampla suite of software modules is that users of the product can harness the power of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). OEE is a benchmarking tool used to help companies focus on improving the performance and efficiency of their machinery and manufacturing process. The OEE formula (Availability x Performance rate x Quality rate) is used to find the greatest areas of improvement so that a business can start with the area that will provide the greatest return on assets. The OEE formula will show how improvements in changeovers, quality, machine reliability, working through breaks and more, affect the bottom line.
Studies indicate that the average OEE rate of manufacturing plants is 60%.
However, to be considered World class an OEE must be considered to be 85% or better. This obviously means that in the average manufacturing plant there is an enormous amount of room for improvement. Jeremy Bolton is convinced that in many cases users are not aware of the power of OEE. As he says of OEE data "If you capture it and grow it the differences are phenomenal." Jeremy maintains that a 10% improvement in OEE is very achievable by using the Ampla product and that such an improvement could yield dramatic results in the bottom line.
Ampla proof
An example of the product's power comes in an example from Amcor in Australia. Amcor Beverage Cans operates a plant that makes 2 million aluminium drink can bodies per day. The challenge presented to Citect was to implement a system to automatically capture downtime and plant throughput information and calculate performance metrics in real time to drive a series of process improvement initiatives. From its suite of Ampla modules, Citect provided downtime, production and metrics and the services to configure them.
The Ravesby plant had an existing CitectSCADA system that Ampla was installed on top of. Since installing the system Amcor has cut back the time it takes to collect and collate plant performance data from one day to a few minutes per month. The management can now identify and solve the causes of plant downtime and subsequently increase productivity
Amcor now has the ability to record real time operational data at the plant, work area and machine levels, and to generate metrics that can be meaningfully compared with other can making plants, both within Amcor and externally. One important result of the installation, that I am sure most plant managers will identify with is that now when the plant manager asks for capital for a project it is given without question. The main factor in this is, as Jeremy Bolton says " The data coming from the plant is now so good that people no longer have to argue about unknowns."
When writing about such a potentially complex system it is difficult to briefly summarise the core benefits. Potential users of the Ampla system are widely spread, from medium size companies to the super-super large, as long as the site has some degree of automation. In terms of where the product is applicable it appears to be pretty much universal, indeed as Jeremy Bentley states "We haven't found an industry it is not applicable to." More articles from Citect Ltd: | 
