General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. is a Department of Defense contractor and
leading manufacturer of remotely piloted aircraft systems, radars, state-of-the-art ground
control systems, and electro-optic solutions. But with such diversity of business activities,
General Atomics was facing several data-related challenges. Sharing information and data
between business units was proving unduly difficult. “We're very vertically integrated and
a lot of our organizations don't know what each other are doing,” said Russell Manson,
Integration Automation Architect at General Atomics, during PI World San Francisco 2019.
To address these and other challenges, General Atomics formed an internal team called the Manufacturing Center
for Continuous Improvement (MCCI). With the help of the PI System and FogLAMP,
Manson and his MCCI team soon found that they could harvest, display,
and share data in an easy, intuitive way.
Year: 2019
A pulp and paper factory is made up of equipment, processes, and people,
all of which must work together to drive efficiencies across the production
line. As one of Europe’s largest pulp and paper factories, Mondi Štětí is
continually seeking ways to make better, faster decisions—while minimizing
environmental impact and maintaining consistent quality. For 19 years, Mondi
has used the PI System to gather real-time intelligence to give people the
visibility they need to optimize equipment and processes. As the factory
has expanded, Mondi’s journey with the PI System has grown, putting the
company on the path to reaching lofty production goals.
Year: 2019
Energy Queensland has been in business for more than a hundred years. In a century of
delivering electrical power to a northeastern Australian territory two and a half times the
size of Texas, the company has risen to every challenge of its harsh rural terrain. But lately,
advances in renewable energy have begun to test Energy Queensland’s capacity like never
before. As solar power becomes cheaper and more feasible, large solar farms are emerging
in the company’s territory, seeking to feed electricity back into a grid designed for the
one-way flow of power. At the same time, grid-independent home solar is becoming cost-competitive
with electrical rates, putting downward pressure on the utility’s operating costs.
Year: 2019
A manufacturer of autoclaves, core lechers, and vulcanizers, Bondtech strives to be more than just a vendor. “We don’t want to just sell you a machine and then walk away,” Brainard said during his presentation at PI World San Francisco 2019. “If you’re buying our equipment, we want to be your forever partner.” But the dream of being a forever partner was costing Bondtech a lot of time and money. A lack of access to customers’ asset data was driving up maintenance costs and hindering the company’s ability to service machines once they were sold. Fortunately, Brainard had worked with the PI System before. “I knew the data historian and I knew the analytics capability. I knew of the notification capability. So I knew that I wanted to center the solution around [the PI System],” he said.
Year: 2019
For almost 90 years, Dérivés Résiniques et Terpeniques (DRT) has manufactured two pine resin extracts: turpentine and rosin. The extracts are utilized by blue chip international brands that produce everything from cosmetics and perfume to adhesives, rubber tires, chewing gum, and food supplements.
Before adopting OSIsoft’s data infrastructure, production engineers at DRT relied on manual data entry, control room phone calls and data collection with spreadsheets to determine the effectiveness of their equipment. Today, the PI System is used at four different plants and monitors over 15,000 data streams from DRT’s assets, such as its steam generators and product distillation columns.
Year: 2018