Zero downtime
SCADA Replacement
60+ min → 2 min
Shift Report Compilation
Seconds
Coil Trace Retrieval
Full line
Line Stages Covered
The Challenge
The manufacturer operates a continuous annealing furnace line comprising multiple process stages — destacker, entry accumulator, furnace heating and soaking zones, atmosphere purging, cooling section, and exit stacker. Furnace process parameters — zone temperatures, atmosphere gas flow rates, belt speed, and tube surface temperature — were monitored via a legacy SCADA system that had not been supported by the vendor for several years. Alarm history was limited to a rolling 7-day log with no long-term storage, making it impossible to correlate process conditions with quality outcomes across the full line. Tube traceability was paper-based: coil identity and furnace run details were recorded manually on traveller cards, which were sometimes lost or illegible. Production and quality reports had to be compiled manually by the QC engineer from multiple sources at the end of each shift, typically taking over an hour.
The Solution
Deployed a MACHHUB-based SCADA, traceability, and reporting solution covering the complete annealing line from destacker to exit stacker. The line's Omron CVM1 PLCs were connected via Omron Host Link protocol, with all zone temperatures, atmosphere gas readings, purging status, belt speed, and alarm states from every line stage captured continuously into MACHHUB's historian at 10-second intervals. At the loading area, the operator scans the coil barcode to open a digital traceability record; SAP HANA pushes the coil order information to MACHHUB as a production event, linking the production order to the traceability record before the coil enters the line. The full process parameter log for the entire run through all stages, including any alarms raised, is linked to that coil record. When the coil reaches the unloading area and the run is completed, MACHHUB compiles and sends a full coil process report — covering all zone temperatures, atmosphere readings, alarm events, and parameter compliance — back to SAP HANA for archiving against the production order. At shift end, production and quality reports covering furnace utilisation, parameter compliance by zone, atmosphere control adherence, alarm frequency, and coil throughput are generated automatically from the historian data with no manual compilation required.
The Result
The legacy SCADA was fully replaced with minimal production interruption — cutover was completed during a scheduled maintenance window. Long-term process historian data is now retained indefinitely, and the QC team can retrieve the full furnace and line parameter log for any coil within seconds. Shift reports that previously took over an hour to compile are now generated in under two minutes. In the three months following go-live, analysis of the historian data identified a recurring temperature deviation pattern in the third heating zone during the night shift — traced to an operator habit of manually overriding the set point. The deviation was corrected and a parameter lock was enforced, improving tube surface quality consistency.
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