Automated paintshop helps improve customer service

A manufacturing execution system is helping to improve consistency of quality of paintwork on massive 40 tonne earth moving machinery, by recording critical metrics from the production process to provide detailed traceability.

ITT Contracts was tasked with automating the plant, which consisted of three combined spray booth and curing ovens. There were also requirements to interface the control system to the existing IT network, to allow access to production data for quality control and development purposes, to monitor and control energy consumption and to design in capacity for future expansion.

Despite all of this the budget was tight and an elegantly simple solution was required so that the planned interfacing and expansion could proceed without undue difficulty.

Ian Hatch, the project leader, first considered a SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) but quickly rejected the idea because it would be too expensive to interface to the IT networks as access to the data was required across the entire site’s PC network. He could also see that expanding such a system at a later date would be very expensive.