Improving performance with plant data

Continental AG is a German publicly listed automotive supplier group headquartered in Hanover. In 2015, the company employed approximately 212,000 people at over 200 locations in 53 countries. Continental is the market leader in tire production in Germany. Over the years, the group has evolved from a pure tire manufacturer to the world's largest automotive supplier.

The nucleus of today's Continental AG was a small rubber processing company at the Vahrenwald location near Hanover in 1869. Even today, at this traditional location — which also houses the group's headquarters — rubber products are manufactured for the automotive industry. Among other things, there are two different production plants of ContiTech where bellows for air spring systems are manufactured. These bellows are assembled in a plant from multiple layers of elastomers and aramid fiber bundles to increase strength, and later crimped around a steel tube as part of the air spring system. "Our air spring systems are used in all major car brands," reports Angelo Bindi, Deputy Director Industrial Engineering at Continental AG.

While the automation technology of one of the two plants was recently completely renewed, it was decided to keep the second vulcanization plant with its older S7-family controller models. "The plant runs stably and efficiently," adds A. Bindi. "So there was no reason for major changes." The various sensors and actuators are controlled with Siemens S7 PLCs. There is no supervisory control system.

Access to production data

However, for a further increase in production efficiency, it is important to gain seamless access to production data. "Our goal was to extract all relevant plant and production values from the controller in order to analyze them for further increases in plant performance," confirms the manager. "Above all, measured values should be transmitted at cyclic time intervals." Doing the right thing with the right means — that is A. Bindi's implementation of efficiency. It is not always necessary to replace major plant components, as long as stable and profitable production is still guaranteed.

But that does not mean there is no room for improvement. Increasing plant performance first and foremost requires maximum data transparency. "Until now, measured values were partly recorded manually," emphasizes the engineer. "This process absolutely needed to be automated." One option would have been to retrofit an OPC UA module on the controller. However, the plant operators wanted to avoid any type of additional hardware. "We wanted a pure software solution," underlines the automation specialist.

Connecting controller and database with a software solution

Through the trade journal etz elektrotechnik & automation, they became aware of the SQL4automation Connector solution. This software solution conveniently connects a wide range of controllers to databases. It was developed for industrial use and meets high requirements for reliability and performance. "Through SQL4automation, we have direct access to production and plant values in our Microsoft SQL database," says A. Bindi with satisfaction. "This now enables continuous evaluation of the plant." All relevant values are visualized via a traffic light system, and plant operators can see all important information about the plant's condition at a glance.

Data in the right format

"SQL4automation has now been implemented at our facility for over a year," reports A. Bindi. "Once put into operation, the solution has been running completely without issues since then and delivers the desired mapped data directly in the right format."

A single software license was sufficient for this. The implementation effort was very manageable with the standard library blocks for the Siemens S7 PLC. "We are very satisfied," concludes the Continental manager. "Once installed, the reliable solution delivers." Due to the successful deployment, additional plants at Continental have since been equipped with the SQL4automation solution.