The control system of the Münzing Chemie GmbH in Heilbronn/Germany had reached the end of its capacity. Although recently installed, the six S7-400 type controllers with PCS7 as control system could not accept any additional functions, the licensed number of variables was already exceeded. For a planned extension, the system manufacturer had offered a new version of the PCS7 control system and a hardware upgrade of the S7 CPUs from type 416 to type 417. As an alternative, ProLeiT offered just the replacement of the software to provide space for extensions that provided the basis for the batch functionality and completed the whole conversion after a short configuring with only seven days downtime.
Münzing Chemie GmbH has its main office in Heilbronn and subsidiaries in Italy, Spain, Belgium and the USA and supplies additives for colorants, adhesives, construction chemistry, leather processing and the paper industry. The company began to automate its production in Heilbronn and wanted to upgrade its plants. However, this could not be realized as planned, as this was no longer possible with version 4.0 of the existing PCS 7 system for several reasons: the licence for the number of variables had already been exceeded and the manufacturer declined to guarantee further secure operation. Further, the installed version could no longer be upgraded and therefore a completely new version was necessary. In addition, the 416 CPUs of the subordinate S7 controllers would have had to be replaced with the 417 type.
When ProLeiT received the contract for the migration of this plant to its own Plant iT system, the primary goal was to convert the existing functionality 1:1 and add smaller extensions. In addition, the operability should be simplified, and more clarity provided for the visualization. The Direct iT modules, for the process control functions, and Acquis iT, for the production data management, were used. The secondary goal was to prepare the system for the installation of the Batch iT module with integrated materials management and order management and so permit a batch operation of the plant. This also provided the basis in future to accept production orders from the operational SAP system and to add these directly to the order management of the batch system.