Complete vertical integration to achieve consistent quality worldwide was the aim of Atotech, a global leader in the highly complex world of plating chemicals, equipment and services for printed circuit boards, package substrate and semiconductor manufacturing, as well as decorative and functional surface finishing. The solution was to provide a flexible recipe management for globally distributed products.

With locations in more than 40 countries in all important industrial regions of the world, Atotech is an international company employing more than 4,000 people around the globe. In order to provide consistent quality worldwide, Atotech focuses on standardized processes and IT systems, in accordance with the Manufacturing Excellence paradigm. As a specialist in Industrial Engineering and Solutions for Manufacturing Excellence, Spiratec cooperated with Emerson to implement these requirements within nine months in a pilot, which has now also been rolled out at a site in Malaysia, with more locations to follow.

Standardization and Simplification

Besides standardizing processes and improving evaluation options in the plants, Atotech‘s aim was also to standardize production systems. Since Atotech uses SAP ERP centrally and also maintains the production recipes there, a way was sought for production planners, both within the country and abroad, to create production orders referring to the central recipes in the ERP system and to send these directly to the production plants. The solution in ERP was to be flexible enough so that, already in the ERP system, the appropriate process engineering recipes can be structured using a recipe–building block library (basic operations such as tempering, stirrers, cleaning, quality control etc.). A production campaign (Pool) in ERP should consist of a mixed or formulation order for a tank or a line, one or more filling orders and an optional cleaning order. Every order is displayed by a recipe in the ERP system.

Besides the actual product-relevant recipe parameters for the plant, employees should also receive instructions from the ERP system in the local language. Differences between the production plants themselves were to be compensated by the locally applicable control system functions (phases).

Traceability of the raw materials used per employee and order was also required, as was the recording of production-relevant parameters for automatic verification of the quantities produced (SAP PP and PPPI) and quality-relevant data to the QM Module of the SAP ERP system. Via the central recipe management the solution should also be easily rolled out for any number of production sites.

Solution and System Selection

The ERP system with SAP was already in place. XSteps (Execution Steps) were configured in the ERP system, and added to the routings (PI) and plan recipes (PPPI), to map the individual recipe-building blocks (basic operations). Atotech decided to use SAP MII (Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence) as a platform for vertical integration to send control recipes from the ERP to the production sites.

SAP MII converts the XML control recipes from the ERP system into B2MML messages (Business to Manufacturing Markup Language). SAP MII also ensures that only complete campaigns are sent to the production control systems and sorts the orders, according to the interface logic in place, from largest to smallest filling order. Upon completion of a production order SAP MII / SAP PCo (Plant Connectivity) confirms all the quantities and SAP QM-relevant data which are recorded in an Historian System for each production order.

Atotech chose Emerson‘s DeltaV as its process control system at the local locations. The Emerson DeltaV System has a standardized interface for OPC DA to OSIsoft PI. Accordingly, OSIsoft PI was used as the Plant Information Management System to record production-relevant batch- and trend data (Historian) for all locations. The PI system is not only responsible for collecting data locally but also for forwarding them to a central PI server instance from where they are used to do order confirmations in the SAP ERP system later. As soon as a production order is finished, OSIsoft PI sends a notification to SAP MII which then reads the production data from OSIsoft PI and posts them to SAP ERP.

Since the recipes on the process control system had to be adequately protected from unauthorized access, only the basic operations were stored locally on the servers at the production sites. The basic recipes are only available on the SAP ERP system in the headquarters. DeltaV implemented this requirement with a two-stage interlinked mechanism:

At the first stage, a software interface unit was devised which creates a campaign in Emerson DeltaV for the new production order (B2MMLdata file) received. Every campaign can consist of one or more batch basic recipes and every batch can in turn consist of 1 – 3 different batch levels (partial recipes) e.g. for “checking of the raw materials to be used”, “formulation”, “filling”, etc..

After the production order has been initiated in DeltaV and prior to the execution of a control operation, the product-relevant parameters for the subsequent control operation (e.g. tempering) are transmitted. The control function (phase) evaluates these parameters and initiates the switch to the following control operation and the allocation of the corresponding parameters. This cyclical process is repeated until every control operation in every batch stage has been completed.

The routing for the plant unit was integrated into the flow diagrams for the visualization of the progress of the work within the batch – also in the local language. The routing information and instructions displayed are maintained in SAP and forwarded to DeltaV via the production order information as B2MML-message. The various dosing options per vessel of the dosing equipment were carried out by DeltaV-side dynamic addressing. A 2D barcode scanner installed at every operator station checks, the palletized and labelled raw material sacks, to ensure their appropriate allocation to the batch, as well as in regards to their type and quantity. Valve islands, stirrers and scales were installed as Profibus DP devices.

Usage and quality-related data must be archived and forwarded by DeltaV to the centralized OSIsoft PI system.

From Vision to full Vertical Integration

Atotech had the vision to use SAP ERP as the central recipe repository. With our solution and the selection of best of breed systems, as well as the introduction of standardized interfaces, it is possible to use a standard set of recipes created in SAP ERP across all sites. Each local site can use standard recipes, which allows for central recipe management and guarantees consistent quality in every production site worldwide:

• Control recipes from SAP ERP are sent directly to the control system using the SAP MII integration services.
• The recipes can be flexibly composed of operations in the DeltaV control system, i.e. the control system no longer has fixed and predefined recipes
• The Emerson DeltaV / OSIsoft PI Standard interface enables all relevant production data to be recorded centrally.
• Feedback and quality-relevant data of the completed recipes are read automatically by SAP MII from OSIsoft PI and transmitted to the SAP ERP and posted in the QM module. QM reports with trend curves of temperatures etc. are created in SAP MII and automatically uploaded into the SAP DMS (Document Management System) in PDF format.

Spiratec thus assumed responsibility for the following operations or implemented them on behalf of the customer:

• Implementation of data security according to ISA99
• OSIsoft PI: consultancy, planning and introduction of OSIsoft PI and the relevant interfaces (OPC and Emerson DeltaV batch interface).
•  Control system (Emerson DeltaV): on the customer side (client support), support in commissioning and supervision.
• SAP MII: consultancy, planning and implementation of the interfaces between SAP ERP (PP, PPPI) and the PLS (data transfer in B2MML format), confirmations to SAP ERP from OSIsoft PI.
• Support following Go-Live for the systems OSIsoft PI and SAP MII / SAP PCo