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Former Member
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Executive summary

As a sub-company of Shanghai Huayi (Group) Company, Huayi Energy Chemical Co., Ltd founded in 1958 is a large comprehensive chemical industry enterprise with coal as raw material. In the work floor, we introduced a lot of systems to assist manufacturing, such as MES, LIMS, DCS, OSIsoft PI, SAP ERP, Emergency Response System and so on. The users can access these systems to check the manufacturing status. These systems help us digitalized all manufacturing data but they also bring challenge to us since we need to manually collect the data from different data sources and analyze the data in Excel. In this condition, the managers cannot get valued analysis data on time. So far we have huge data on hand, for example our PI historian data is over 10 years, but we cannot make a full use of it.

The following illustrated the original application network structure:

In this condition, we need a platform to integrate all information from diverse data sources and supply real time analysis for manufacturing decision making. After a serious comparison, we found SAP MII on HANA is the best solution for us. On one hand, it gives us the ability to integrate different data sources into one dashboard; on the other hand, we can import the huge historian data into HANA which will solve the data access performance issue.

Here’s the current network structure:

The Human impact of SAP hana

Before we build our custom application, the engineers need to manually collect all kinds of data from different systems weekly. This is a heavy workload and affects the correctness and timeliness. Meanwhile, the managers need to wait for the reports from different departments. So it made the managers feel painful since they couldn’t get the data at the first time. Now the engineers do not need to manually collect the data anymore, and the managers can get the manufacturing status on dashboard in real time and they even can track every metadata if they prefer.


Business or social value

Based on SAP MII on HANA, we can deliver the content according to the user’s role on time. So the managers and engineers can just focus on their own field and give a quick best-possible action according to the information supplied by the system.


Technical impact

Considering our requirement, we choose Huawei RH5885H V3 as the hardware platform which has 256GB memory, 3T date volume and 1T log volume.

In some report, we need to refer the PI to get the manufacturing data and it usually will took 10~15 seconds to response. But now it usually shows the content in 1 second and this is an amazing improvement.


Business application

As the whole chemical industry faces an environment of uncertainty and change, we seek to improve our operational efficiency & yields, quality & regulatory compliance and asset & safety performance, and this need a better OT & IT fusion. At present, we urgently need a system to assist plant managers & engineers to monitor the operational KPIs and supply the ability to track the root cause for any manufacturing failure in real time. At the same time, we also need the predictive ability basing on our historian data. To achieve these goals, we need to integrate data from different data sources and use high performance database to manipulate the historian data.

The company management board sees the importance of such kind system and decides to choose one plant to implement the solution. With the leadership of CEO, CIO & plant general manager, we initiate the POC project of KPI Monitor & Root Cause Analysis.

Since the methanol is our key product, we selected this product line as a pilot and the manufacturing process looks like following:

 

Choosing MII on HANA as the platform for this solution is not a quick decision, we did an overall consideration. Firstly, we have already implemented many SAP products (FI, CO, MM, PM, EHS, BW etc.), so we need the new platform is compatible with these modules.  Secondly, a lot of manufacturing data is storedin the flat files (CSV, XLS, XLSX), it is really important for us to keep these data and make a full use of them in our predictive decision making. With the ETL tools supplied by SAP MII on HANA, it makes upload these flat files into database possible. Thirdly, the solution implementation and maintenance cost is low on the new platform. Last but not least, the high performance of SAP MII on HANA matches with our real time reporting goal.

Under the help of SAP PAC (Partner Adoption Center) team, we designed and delivered this solution. The overall architecture show as following:

With the Plant Information Catalog powered by MII on HANA, we built the asset information model which aligns all data from different data source into one model. This reduced the data definition conflicts between different departments.

Meanwhile, the SAPUI5 speeds up our solution development and makes our solution is available to different mobile devices.

When the user drills down the alarmed KPI, he/she can find out the root cause for the alarm. Here we use the product on time delivery KPI to explain the design logistics:

This POC project gives the management team an insight about what’s going on in the work floor and supplies the root cause tracking ability to locate the problem on time.

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