Plug & produce solution for pharmaceutical plants

Col­lab­o­ra­tion between ABB and Werum IT Solu­tions on Shop Floor Inte­gra­tion reduces engi­neer­ing, val­i­da­tion and test­ing time asso­ci­at­ed with biotech production.
Designed for estab­lished phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing plants with exist­ing machin­ery, the new soft­ware solu­tion called Shop Floor Inte­gra­tion Ver­sion 2.0 allows for the cre­ation of a dig­i­tal twin of the exist­ing sys­tem pri­or to instal­la­tion. This reduces engi­neer­ing, val­i­da­tion and test­ing time and min­i­mizes the plant’s down­time. Using this new solu­tion, engi­neers save between 40% and 70% of the time spent on inte­grat­ing sys­tems when com­pared to exist­ing solutions.
The Shop Floor Inte­gra­tion inter­face con­nects Werum’s PAS‑X man­u­fac­tur­ing exe­cu­tion sys­tem (MES) to exist­ing shop floor equip­ment. This dig­i­tal solu­tion pre­vents pro­duc­tion bot­tle­necks and reduces cycle times so as to low­er inven­to­ries, free up capac­i­ty and increase efficiency.
The com­pa­ny togeth­er with Werum has devel­oped a mes­sage-based com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem that sends and receives instruc­tion between the MES and the pro­duc­tion equip­ment. This pro­vides reg­u­lar syn­chro­niza­tion between the sys­tems and com­mu­ni­cates data such as qual­i­ty, set­point and consumption.
Two phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies are ear­ly adopters of ABB’s Shop Floor Inte­gra­tion prod­uct. GE Health­care runs it as a new man­u­fac­tur­ing instal­la­tion and anoth­er large com­pa­ny is imple­ment­ing Shop Floor Inte­gra­tion on an exist­ing plant. GE Healthcare’s site in Upp­sala, Swe­den, is the first in the world to use ABB’s mes­sage-based com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem to con­nect the MES to its DCS (Dis­trib­uted Con­trol System).
The his­tor­i­cal route for inte­gra­tion between man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems was both labor-inten­sive and mul­ti-staged. The com­pa­ny has cut down the often lengthy process need­ed to define OPC tags, define inter­face hand­shakes, states and log­ic and replaced these with a sim­ple, effi­cient and qual­i­fied inter­face need­ing just a few steps – defin­ing the mes­sage, defin­ing PAS‑X and Mas­ter Batch Record inter­ac­tion and steps, and fin­ish­ing with defin­ing DCS and Batch inter­ac­tions and steps. This reduces the pos­si­bil­i­ties for mal­func­tion­ing and makes it sim­pler to pro­gram, with less machine-oper­a­tor inter­ac­tion dur­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing process.