Recipe Management Software

AMS2750

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Join Date
Jan 2016
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8
I’ve been tasked with providing a solution to centrally manage recipes for a variety of furnaces and other processes in my plant. I’ll only talk about furnaces for the sake of simplicity, but the following applies to a number of other processes, so I need some flexibility in the solution. Each furnace has its own PLC running anything from a Honeywell HC900s, ControlLogix, MicroLogix, Siemens S7, etc… and they all have their own HMI from where the operator can select a locally stored recipe (usually stored in the PLC itself) and run a “batch”.

In some cases, we have a group of furnaces that can run the same recipe, which means we have to maintain a copy of recipe “xyz” in say 5 different PLCs and somehow make sure that all 5 copies are identical and always get revised at the same time. Needless to say, that’s an opportunity for mistakes.

What I want to do is remove the various recipes from local storage, and host them on a recipe server. Then an operator would enter a recipe name / number at the furnace HMI and the server would push that recipe to the PLC. This way, we are always using the latest revision of a recipe and every furnace in that group is looking at the source for a given recipe.

Given the variety of equipment, there will also be variety in the recipe structure and the mode of transfer (Modbus, Ethernet IP, and possibly others). I have been designing and programming controls systems for a number of years, but have limited exposure to the various SCADA packages. I am comfortable with undertaking any programming that is needed to make a system like that happen, but I’m concerned about customizing something that I now “own” and am the only one able to support it.

Having said all this, I’m looking for recommendations on a recipe management system (preferably part of a SCADA package) that requires a minimum amount of custom programming, and is primarily limited to configuring the recipe structure and mapping the registers to the equipment it’s related to. The recipe editing interface needs to be intuitive so the process engineers can make their own changes, and I would take care of the initial recipe structure configuration.

So far, I’ve looked at Ignition as I would like to use that platform as my SCADA system, but I’m not finding how I can have multiple furnaces pull from the same recipe. It seems the recipe is locked down to an individual piece of equipment, so that’s somewhat of a show stopper. Maybe someone can enlighten me on that?

I appreciate any feedback and suggestions I can get on that.
 
I am pretty sure you can do it with Ignition, I don't believe that it locks you to an individual piece of equipment. The downside to their recipe manager is that it is considered a part of their 'MES' solution, thus you are susceptible to the MES pricing structure, which means you need a 'tracking point' license for each piece of equipment that will use the recipe manager. This starts to add up quickly. But might be worth it in the long run.

Otherwise, with Ignition just build your own. I've done this and have had good results, however it development time. The hard part is building the database tables to store the recipe data and of course the user interface. The transaction groups make it easy to get the data to the PLC for production control.

Wonderware has their recipe manager plus system, its web-based and surprisingly cost effective. However people I know that have used it aren't particularly impressed by it, but that was on some pretty large process systems so your application is probably significantly simpler than what my colleagues were experiencing.
 
@ gclshortt
I've heard a number of good things on this forum about AdvancedHMI, but I'm looking for as canned of a solution as is practical. It's not my only requirement, but it's up there in priority.

@ Paully's
I did the engineer thing and actually decided to call Inductive Automation as a last resort after spending a bit of time butting my head against the wall trying to figure it out. Come to find out that their recipe module will do the job. Basically a recipe written on the line level is propagated down to the cell level and can be "shared" by the various cells.

@ sbaum
How's their recipe module?

I'll try to reach out to Wonderware and see if I can get some sort of overview. I've looked online, but that's not enough info to help me make an informed decision.

Thanks for the good feedback. If anyone has had good experiences with a platform not mentioned here, I'm still interested in exploring those options.
 
Last edited:
I use Wonderware recipes.
Pretty easy to setup and I have 20 pieces sharing the same recipes. I believe it is fairly powerful.
 

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