SCADA and MES connect with SAP in beverage plant

AriZona Beverages is famous for its 23-ounce ‘big can’, and since its founding in 1992 AriZona has produced popular teas, juices and energy drinks. The company is based in Woodbury, New York, and its newest plant is in Keasbey, New Jersey. The plant opened in November 2019, is 58,000 m² on 15 ha, and will produce 60 million cases of drinks per year.

For the New Jersey plant, AriZona wanted a comprehensive solution for HMI, SCADA, and a manufacturing execution system (MES) that would connect to its ERP system, which is SAP. Working with system integrator Vertech, AriZona implemented a system based on Ignition by Inductive Automation and Sepasoft.

Ignition is an industrial application platform with tools for building solutions in HMI, SCADA and the IIoT. Sepasoft MES works seamlessly with Ignition and provides control, traceability and documentation of the transformation of raw materials into finished goods in real time.

Systems integrator Vertech has extensive experience in food and beverage and other industries. The requirements for the project were to provide the Ignition SCADA platform, the Sepasoft MES solution, an ISA-88-compliant batch control system within Ignition, and a connection to SAP — while also improving access to data for better production efficiency and lower costs.

“We have improved efficiencies and processes throughout the plant,” said Shami Usmani, vice president of engineering and manufacturing for AriZona Beverages.

He said Ignition’s ease of use and flexibility were a big part of the project’s success.

“Getting analytics out of a manufacturing facility has always been difficult,” he said. “We wanted best-in-class software to help us analyse the data received from the plant.”

“Ignition allowed us to integrate a lot of the controls into the batching, communicating with all the different systems in the plant,” said Alex Hunt, quality manager for AriZona Beverages. “It really smoothed out our process.”

He added that Ignition has been easier to use than other systems he’d used in the past.

“We were always adding new recipes into the system, and we found that it was much easier than we’d expected,” Hunt said. “And it’s also very easy to change current recipes.”

Paul Warning, solutions architect with Vertech, said Ignition gave AriZona benefits on several levels.

“The flexibility of Ignition and database integration made it an ideal platform to build a custom batch solution from the ground up that followed the core principles of ISA-88, while also providing some freedoms to adapt the system to AriZona’s business needs,” he said.

Defining those business needs involved AriZona’s core teams getting together to take a good look at their workflows.

“We saw there were a lot of manual handoffs, where people were just exchanging information via emails and phone calls,” said Kimon Stergakos, chief solutions architect for business applications and technology for AriZona. “So we designed a solution that removed those manual handoffs. We identified seven areas where we had those, and now we feel we’re getting a lot out of the fact that we automated that.”

The automated system with Ignition and Sepasoft helps AriZona convert manufacturing data into actionable analytics. It includes a batch control system that interacts with every level of automation, from device control to SAP. The system delivers data for overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), downtime tracking, scheduling, and finished goods reporting.

Another aspect of the solution is Ignition Perspective, which leverages the power of mobile devices.

“The Perspective application for phones and tablets shows a summary of current work orders, sugar tank inventories, syrup tank inventories and more,” Warning said. “You can see what’s been batched, and where the products are. You can see production packaging counts for OEE and downtime, and key performance indicators over the last seven days.”