IPACT: An ArchestrA Certified Solution Provider

IPACT (Integrated Process Automation and Control Technologies)

System integrators are a cornerstone to Wonderware's success. Through the years, Wonderware has relied on their services and expertise to pursue opportunities and enter new markets.

IPACT (Integrated Process Automation and Control Technologies) is an ArchestrA® Certified system integrator in the Wonderware System Integrator Program. Headquartered about 40 miles southeast of Chicago in Valparaiso, Indiana, IPACT has been delivering manufacturing solutions for more than 20 years. The company specializes in turn-key automation systems for the processing and manufacturing industries involving the specification, design and installation of full-range services — from standalone control applications to process control and factory-wide integrated control and information systems.

IPACT has had extensive experience in the development of automation systems for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Automotive, Materials Handling, Metals, Pharmaceuticals and Aerospace industries.

IPACT's Expertise

The company is composed of professionals who take exceptional pride and ownership in what they do. They are comprised of a core group of engineers and developers who have been executing Supervisory HMI, SCADA, and Production and Performance Management (P&PM) systems using Wonderware® software. IPACT's developers are certified in the use of the Wonderware Industrial Application Server, InTouch® HMI, IndustrialSQL Server™ historian, InBatch™ flexible batch management software, InTrack™ manufacturing execution management software, QI Analyst™ statistical process analysis and control software, SuiteVoyager™ Web analysis software, and DT Analyst™ downtime and efficiency management software.

IPACT is highly capable in the areas of manufacturing execution systems (MES), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM). For it has been offering MES, ERP and PLM systems throughout its history. IPACT has provided its customers with many well-received applications and solutions featuring the Wonderware Industrial Application Server, Production Events Module (PEM) and Enterprise Integration Application. In addition, IPACT has implemented numerous successful projects featuring InTrack and InBatch software. Moreover, the company has very rapidly achieved proficiency and experience with the underlying ArchestrA® technology that adds a wide variety of benefits to Wonderware's latest products. (Get more details about the benefits in the Wonderware Advantage section of this story.)

According to IPACT, its success is mostly due to the thorough planning and preparation that takes place prior to project implementation. Detailed needs analysis and functional design are completed even before IPACT begins working on software, hardware and other automation elements. For industrial control projects, sequential function charts (SFCs) guide the IPACT project team throughout the development of the system. The project’s SFC enables the team to break down the logic of the system and partition the implementation effort to multiple developers who produce a consistent product. This design methodology also allows IPACT to categorize and archive blocks of logic that can be re-used for similar purposes in a variety of applications in a variety of industries. Ultimately, this approach saves IPACT significant time and costs associated with system development.

The IPACT Galaxy Toolkit

Wonderware's Industrial Application Server gives IPACT's integrators the ability to develop tools that yield more efficient solutions. This capability substantially decreases development time and engineering costs. For example, IPACT has developed a toolkit within the Industrial Application Server that speeds up the creation and maintenance of objects and the I/O assignments of object instances. IPACT's Galaxy Toolkit provides a means to create and maintain objects (templates or instances) using a simple Excel spreadsheet interface. The spreadsheet enables the editing of large numbers of items, which makes IPACT's project development process faster and easier. The toolkit also provides a means to easily delete hierarchical objects and templates, without deleting all the children objects first. The toolkit also helps IPACT's personnel assign I/O addresses to object instances based on CSV data output from a galaxy. Data entry involves typing into a simple spreadsheet in an easy-to-use layout. This approach is very useful when the I/O addresses of the same objects change from instance to instance, or when the same object will be used with different PLC platforms. The first time IPACT's Galaxy Toolkit was applied on a project, the time to create and edit the large number of objects and instances was reduced by a factor of 5 — from three (3) weeks to three (3) days. The customer benefited from those savings, and continues to use the Galaxy Toolkit to maintain its objects and instances today.

IPACT in the Materials Industry

One of IPACT's key successes was a Wonderware Production and Performance Management Software Solution for a manufacturer of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles. The customer was convinced that Invensys' ArchestrA® industrial automation and information software architecture on which the Wonderware Industrial Application Server is built was the platform on which it wanted to base its future factory automation. The customer has, in fact, already rolled this solution out to a number of plants and plans to introduce it to many more. Based on input from this customer's corporate engineering department and various plants, IPACT designed, tested and documented standardized objects — some of them very complex hierarchies of other objects — for key pieces of equipment. These objects were then used across numerous lines and plants. Dozens of these objects were created by IPACT engineers, and well over a thousand instances were deployed in the customer's plants. IPACT used its Galaxy Toolkit during the development phase, and this reduced development time considerably.

The rollout of this system into the customer's plants was an unqualified success. Its MES activities, from plant-floor visualization to production-data reporting and analysis are now moving forward based on common, standardized objects across various lines and plants. They are also very pleased with the Galaxy Toolkit and find it saves them a great deal of time when they are working with complex objects.

Wonderware Distributor Standard Automation has been working with IPACT on some major projects because of the system integrator’s expertise in implementing Wonderware MES solutions. "We invited IPACT to join the MES team on one the largest and most complicated ERP and PLM-to-MES implementations in years. From the very first day, IPACT seamlessly blended in with the existing MES team and successfully navigated our team to on-schedule implementation and go-live. We handed IPACT the most complicated efforts of this large-scale project, and the IPACT team never missed their marks," said Sam Cessna, Sales Manager, of Standard Automation.

IPACT in the Aerospace Industry

When a very well-known aerospace company planned to construct a new line of commercial aircraft, IPACT was brought in to provide integration between the manufacturing and enterprise systems. The new IPACT system would seamlessly integrate the enterprise system's modeling, planning and scheduling functions with the aerospace company's manufacturing execution functions.

The construction of a fleet of highly advanced passenger jets is among the largest business and technical challenges to be found today. Virtually every conceivable rigorous requirement for modern manufacturing is present, from short-horizon scheduling and just-in-time inventory, to stringent federal record-keeping and reporting requirements.

IPACT created a manufacturing execution system leveraging the ArchestrA architecture to facilitate the entire manufacturing process. The IPACT team coordinated the use of the factory equipment, labor and materials to implement manufacturing plans in accordance with the SAP schedule. It used components from the Wonderware Enterprise Integration Application and Production Events Module to provide a communications interface between the SAP modules and the MES system (that included Wonderware software).

In this project, IPACT served as the Solution Architect and Lead Implementers for integrating the manufacturing components with SAP production scheduling components. The system had to present production orders and engineering data in a manufacturing context. IPACT also acted as the Solution Architect and Lead Implementers for the recording of overall production data; support reporting including long-term, as-built record-keeping; and the overall MES system implementation.

The Wonderware Enterprise Integration Application provides a long-term maintainable solution for direct communications between SAP and the manufacturing system including the MES, built on standard products and off-the-shelf components and tools. The high level of integration reduces the amount of manual data entry by shop-floor personnel and provides a robust production-reporting and record-keeping system to fulfill the requirements of the FAA and the aviation industry as a whole.

The Wonderware Advantage

IPACT's use of Wonderware software provides a means of delivering a robust solution to its customers. Here are the advantages that Wonderware software solutions and ArchestrA technology offer:

• Structure. Extending hierarchical structures — especially naming structures — all the way down to the plant floor has major organizational and time-saving advantages. Modern PLCs, for example, utilize hierarchical tag-naming structures, which integrate perfectly with the Industrial Application Server and enable objects to assign their own I/O, thus eliminating the need for tag-database creation and maintenance.
• Reusability. A concept that was discussed for decades has finally been made a practical reality for industrial automation with the Industrial Application Server and its underlying ArchestrA software architecture. The ability to implement solutions in true hierarchical objects that can be deployed in many plants and projects not only increases productivity in implementing projects now, but promises accelerating productivity in the future, as more and more solutions are encapsulated in objects.
• Flexibility. With the Industrial Application Server, solutions are not strongly tied to the architecture of the hardware platforms. Software implementation can proceed with the assurance that changes to the hardware architecture will have little or no impact on the software.
• Standardization. At the MES/ERP level, in years past all solutions were largely custom built. But now, for the first time, with the advent of the Wonderware Enterprise Integration Application, there is a product that provides a standard platform for these solutions over a wide range of industries and existing configurations.

The Wonderware Industrial Application Server and its underlying ArchestrA software architecture empower IPACT to execute projects across multiple locations using the same tools and program objects. The benefits provided by Wonderware software offer a means by which a simplified, maintainable and repeatable solution can be implemented in very complex manufacturing systems.

The Wonderware SI Program

Find out more about the Wonderware System Integrator Program in which IPACT has achieved ArchestrA Certified status. IPACT has achieved the highest level of participation of this multi-tiered program, which is based on certification of individual developers and the overall company's participation. The ArchestrA® Certified tier acknowledges system integration companies' expertise with building products that leverage ArchestrA technology and specifically the Wonderware Industrial Application Server.

Get More Information on IPACT

For more information about IPACT, please contact:

Mark Harbison
260 S. Campbell St.
Valparaiso, IN 46385
USA
Tel: (219) 464-7212, ext. 106
FAX: (219) 464-5387
E-mail: harbison@ipact.com
Website: www.ipact.com