The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is a globally accepted approach basedon the UN's enterprise sustainable development goal.

Sustainable management requires balancing profitability with environmental protection,social obligation, and ethical governance. Deploying intelligent devices can help enterprises improve efficiency, manage energy resources, reduce waste, monitor pollution,protect the environment, integrate systems, and provide transparent operations,ultimately advancing sustainable ESG management goals.

Project challenges/goals

In 2019, COVID-19 caused a significant change in human lifestyle and increased global attention on corporate sustainability. The pandemic has led to a hybrid work model that combines on-premise and remote work, along with a labor shortage in factories. This situation has resulted in operational gaps and errors. Also, predicting personnel attendance across departments became difficult, causing communication and integration issues.

The primary goal of this application study was to reduce operational errors, shorten operation time, automate work instructions, and enable real-time data transmission between the production line and company systems for a successful production line operation. This application story is about a printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer that used machines to handle strenuous tasks on the production line. However, before the machines could operate, the employees had to manually enter the individual paper-based production orders and formula data into the equipment’s settings. In addition, the lack of real-time feedback from the independent testing station dynamically reporting defective product conditions led to higher maintenance costs. The client seeks to reduce paper use and personnel errors, and connect the machine with the ERP system, enabling the testing station to provide real-time feedback on test results.

Solution overview 

The customer needed a smart machine. The Beijer Electronics X2 HMI could retrieve production data for subsequent analysis without modifying the equipment's controller program. Regardless of the brand of the PLC controller inside the customer's machine, X2 supports over 95% of communication protocols in the market. No changes needed to be made to the controller's hardware or software; the customer used a few simple settings on the Smart HMI collected and exchanged operating information of the equipment to facilitate subsequent IT integration. Besides the essential OT data collection,
X2 generated real-time reports (CSV/PDF) for factory production review and updated production status through visualization, allowing operators to see production results intuitively such as yields and FPY (First Pass Yield).

Application story

Along with its original HMI functions, the X2 HMI can connect to a barcode scanner replacing manual input and reducing human errors. The X2 HMI can also communicate with ERP systems to receive related information. Scanning the work order number with the barcode scanner not only complies with ESG environmental protection measures by reducing paper usage but also avoids errors that may occur during manual input and shortens the time required for data input and verification.

After receiving the work order number, the Beijer Electronics X2 HMI requests the ERP system to provide the corresponding parameters and formulas. The operator only have to confirm the information before the X2 HMI writes the relevant parameters and formula into the controller for production.

The X2 HMI is not just an HMI but also functions as a gateway. The built-in SQL data formatting and IT communication protocols like OUP UA Server/Client, MQTT, and Rest API enable easy integration of OT information with other internal work systems. This attribute solves the common communication problem between IT and OT in the current IoT implementation in the market.

Production lines and testing groups typically operate independently without communication and coordinated realtime information. The X2 HMI enables information
synchronization between the production and testing groups, reducing costs and unnecessary waste.

Testers usually record test results on paper and then input the results into the system, resulting in increased human effort and delayed information. The X2 HMI allows the testing group to notify the production team immediately to review the production process if the number of defective products exceeds a specific quantity. This feature immediately corrects production errors, reduces subsequent testing problems, and minimizes unnecessary rework costs. (See Figure 1)

After the upgrade, the customer provided feedback that the Beijer Electronics X2 series HMI had significantly improved the efficiency of their production lines, reducing unnecessary errors and production costs. The Beijer Electronics X2 series HMI successfully integrated OT and IT information, effectively improving information exchange and integration capabilities between different systems within the company. The customer achieved the goals of industrial upgrading towards IoT and sustainable management through ESG.

Download the application >>