Building a Modular Machine Visualization Solution

For many mass-produced products, standardization and modularity are great ways to improve overall efficiency. However, this approach is challenged when the products must incorporate many variations. Mespack, Barcelona, Spain, an international packaging machinery manufacturer of horizontal and vertical form-fill-seal, end-of-line, and water-soluble pods equipment for consumer-packaged goods (CPGs) serving the world’s leading brands, experienced the latter situation.

“Mespack offers a wide-ranging industry product portfolio. We may supply a single machine to a customer or a turn-key solution for entire production lines. While we offer standard products, there is great customer demand for various sizes, capabilities, and other customizations, so all equipment is tailor-made,” says Adrián Mora, automation and controls engineer at Mespack.

From a mechanical standpoint, Mora says Mespack made great strides over the years in designing machines featuring modular construction so they could rapidly offer a variety of solutions based on proven technology. Because the digital graphical human-machine interface (HMI) is the highly visible way that operators interact with the equipment, it plays a key role in the overall acceptance of any machine design (Figure 1). Figure 1: An HMI is a vital and highly visible way for operators to interact, so it must provide clear visualization, extensive connectivity, and scalable design flexibility.

Mespack’s design team needed to select an HMI software platform that would provide significant design flexibility, modern visualization, extensive connectivity, and the ability to scale and address future needs—just as modular as their mechanical approach.

Taking a closer look at the HMI

Over the years, the Mespack design team became well-acquainted with various HMIs. Some products were standalone, while others could be networked as larger supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. They knew what worked and held some strong opinions about how an HMI/SCADA platform would need to support their efforts for current and future equipment.

A primary consideration for selecting a new standard HMI/SCADA was that it needed to use scalable vector graphics to deliver a modern look and feel like any contemporary web experience (Figure 2). However, any HMI/SCADA platform encompasses more than just a striking outward appearance, so the Mespack team created a list of other must-have features. Some of those requirements included graphical elements, objects, and library support—including both standard and user-developed objects—through an easy-to-use integrated development environment, promoting consistency and rapid configuration by developers.

Figure 2: By using clear and consistent graphical elements and options for viewing operations and configuring machine settings, the Emerson Movicon.NExT HMI/SCADA platform delivers a high-performance user interface experience.“A user-centered interface readily adopted and understood by all levels of their customers’ staff. Support for creating configurations is based largely on the ISA101 human-machine interface standard, but with the ability to add new and specific functionalities to help users operate the machines. Comprehensive multi-driver communications so the platform could interact with any target OT-located PLC or intelligent device, and with any higher-level IT computing resources,” Mora says. “Advanced capabilities—such as scripting for sophisticated functions, and 21 CFR Part 11 electronic records/signatures compliance for regulated applications—and an application programming interface (API) so the developers could create their own internal automated methods for rapidly developing configurations.”

It also needs to be able to run standalone on a desktop or industrial PC and be deployed in a client/server architecture while providing secure cloud connectivity and mobile visibility and options for loading/viewing/managing/storing machine settings and exposing data and operating information through graphical widgets, reports, SMS, emails, and more.

Mespack was looking for a unified visualization and data handling HMI/SCADA platform with ample innovation to adapt to their current equipment and future requirements while offering a user-friendly and streamlined user experience. They had hands-on experience with many products that could not do it all, and this helped inform their research into other products, leading them to select Emerson Movicon.NExT as its standardized HMI/SCADA platform.

Building a digital machine solution

Previous machine HMI configurations were more specific to individual machines, and there was no effective or efficient way to standardize the work and adapt it from one machine or project to another. So, the first task was to develop typical graphical objects, screen navigation methods, and other principles that would be useful for all machines.

Figure 3: The Mespack Athena HMI/SCADA solution is built on Emerson Movicon.NExT, providing a standardized and streamlined look and feel throughout the company’s equipment offerings with operational insights based on data analytics.Thus began the creation of the Mespack Athena HMI/SCADA solution. This digital platform gives customers the power to maximize the value of their production data by performing various tasks ranging from machine control to data analytics (Figure 3). Now, the company can offer a consistent look-and-feel across their equipment offerings, reducing the operator learning curve while enabling the creation of a growing library of objects for easy implementation into each new project, speeding development and minimizing retesting.

“The solution moves beyond basic machine monitoring, setup, and command options and provides additional value by giving users complete access to their production data, along with the ability to perform analytics on this data to provide insights for optimizing production, maximizing uptime, improving quality, and minimizing energy usage,” says Maurizio Zaniboni, senior software engineer, Emerson R&D.

While some of these installations may be standalone to some extent, they can still be remotely updated for enhanced support. The solution leverages native Windows security and user accounts. Now, Mespack has options to integrate its visualization solution throughout an entire production line, up to the cloud, and even to mobile devices, giving end users more options and capabilities than ever before.

“The company has utilized Movicon NExT scripting functionalities to develop a standardized project featuring a modular architecture. This architectural approach empowers programmers to efficiently configure the project with regard to visualization, navigation, and other functionality. As a result, commissioning time is significantly reduced, errors are avoided, and operational efficiency is enhanced, increasing the end user satisfaction and making the Mespack realization team more efficient,” Zaniboni says.

From a superficial standpoint, some might see an HMI/SCADA as just a collection of everyday graphical objects and buttons and the software category as fully mature and lacking novelty. However, this story highlights the need for an innovative HMI/SCADA platform ready to increase efficiency and performance for OEMs, as well as end users and systems integrators.

According to Mora and Zaniboni, implementing Mespack Athena in the equipment significantly benefits CPGs. Customers can streamline their operations due to the intuitive HMI/SCADA user interface/experience, which features tooltips and recommendations to reduce the learning curve for operators. Integration of the manufacturing process within a scalable platform enhances versatility, while quick access to alarm troubleshooting and preventive maintenance systems improves autonomy. Additionally, operators benefit from easy access to view support documentation.

“Mespack committed to creating modular mechatronic designs to provide a premium equipment offering, and now the HMI/SCADA platform empowers them to carry this concept further for the visualization and data processing aspects of their systems,” Mora concludes.