Published by Thomas Gwosdek
Last updated on November 13, 2024
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8 minute read
An organization fully aligned with the ESG model, Centroflora industrializes nature to deliver valuable supplies to pharmaceutical giants. Until recently, the high degree of automation was based on PLC networks distributed across three different production segments: evaporation, drying, and supply extraction. The company was looking for a way to gain a holistic view of those three environments to support the ongoing evolution of best practices for maintenance and facilities management.
Due to the segmented topology of the factory, the way to analyze PLC data was through visits by professionals from the maintenance team to those environments. Some faults could take hours to diagnose. Another important goal was to gain visibility into the quality of power consumed at the company's various sites. Determined to change this situation, Centroflora’s managers sought a platform for monitoring OT environments that would deliver a predictive view of the entire production environment, contributing to the support of critical business processes.
iAbout Centroflora Group
Centroflora Group stands out for its appreciation of the Brazilian biodiversity as a source of innovation for the phytomedicines market.
With a history dating back over 65 years, Centroflora maintains its tradition as a manufacturer of botanical extracts, essential oils, and isolated active ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry. In recent years, it has also been consolidating itself as a national manufacturer of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) through new partnerships and investments to adapt its production and commercial structure.
The challenge
Centroflora’s technologies and processes allow for the isolation, extraction, concentration, and drying of differentiated natural active ingredients, with assured quality and traceability. As a result, the company offers a wide variety of extracts from different regions of the planet to the market – with special attention to those derived from the Brazilian biodiversity – focusing on total sustainability and respect for the environment. Centroflora has always acted in line with the principles that are now known as ESG.
Currently, the company has its headquarters and main industrial plant in the city of Botucatu in the state of Sao Paulo. Across the state, they have a sales office, their innovation center called “CentroINOVA”. They also have another production plant in the city of Parnaíba, in Brazilian’s Northeast.
“The PRTG sensors help us anticipate failures – an alert triggers actions such as checking what is happening on the factory floor and restarting equipment.”
The solution
Paessler PRTG monitoring software runs on a dedicated virtual server deployed at the Centroflora’s CentroINOVA data center. The platform monitors this environment as well as the entire factory at the headquarters. One of the critical points of the solution was to use an OT monitoring solution compatible with the company's PLCs – Siemens devices running the TIA Portal operating system, a robust solution that meets Centroflora’s needs. PRTG’s integration to TIA Portal streamlined the solution implementation process.
PRTG is currently the big dashboard of a network that starts on the countless PLCs operating on the Centroflora factory, goes on to supervisor microcomputers – traditional PCs that consolidate the data generated by the PLCs – and then goes on to the virtual server at the CentroINOVA data center.
To extend the value of PRTG to monitoring the power consumption used for Manufacturing, the company uses an appliance developed by Paessler's partner, RBS Service, that provides professional services to Centroflora. The appliance is a converter that transforms electrical current into a digital signal. This equipment provides PRTG with the data necessary for the facilities and maintenance team to gain predictive insight into possible failures in the power supply.
“We maintain three separate islands on the factory floor: one for the evaporators, another one for drying, and another one for extracting supplies. These three environments are now integrated into the PRTG interface.”
The benefits
Proactivity in resolving problems and incidents on the factory floor, and inconsistencies in the power supply were decisive for the adoption of PRTG. The facilities management and maintenance teams receive alerts about the status or unusual behavior of the industrial equipment controlled by Siemens PLCs. This allowed the time to diagnose an error to drop from 6 or 7 hours to just a few minutes. This careful look at the production environment also contributed to reducing power costs by 3% to 4%. Before the adoption of PRTG, equipment that should be offline could be unduly in operation.
Regarding power management, the addition of PRTG and an appliance especially developed for Centroflora brought a predictive look at fluctuations in power supply to CentroINOVA and the headquarters. In addition to checking the input of external power sources, it is now possible to check what pieces of equipment of the Centroflora network depend on the external power grid and which devices are already being supported by the generator, and to act quickly to resolve any problems in this area.
Conclusion
The facilities management and maintenance team has been exploring sensors that were already available in the industrial environments – the fact that PRTG supports OPC UA contributed to this. For 2024, the goal is to extract even more value from sensors critical to the company's operation. This is a journey in which the sensor running on the Siemens PLC will generate information that will be translated into PRTG dashboards that business managers can use to make decisions based on data. This is a vision that begins with the business strategy and, when necessary, goes into the deep details of the industrial operation.
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