Better measures of how you’re doing: Solutions to Systems

By Steve Prestegard, Marketplace Magazine

Joe Van De Hey is President of Control Concepts Corporation, which creates hardware to integrate industrial systems, and Plantware, which designs software to “turn plant floor information into knowledge.”

What we do is take the native capability of a machine to tell you the cost per mile of gas divided by the ton of product, or in a machine's case - to measure downtime and downtime cost and revenues the machine generated in a particular day.

Control Concepts Corp. helps machines work better, and its Plantware subsidiary helps machine owners tell how they’re operating better.

Most automobiles have speedometers to measure the vehicles speed, tachometers to measure the engines speed, and fuel to temperature gauges. You would have a hard time finding an automobile with gauges to measure how much driving the car is costing you, or how much money your company is making from your trucks' delivery of a product.

That is the best description of a software program created by Plantware, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Control Concepts Corporation of Appleton. Ralph Clark, the company’s product manager, compared it with the instrument panel of a truck. “You’ve got a temperature gauge, you've got a voltage gauge, and you've got a gas gauge; they measure the process but that doesn't tell you anything about cost or what I’m carrying in back. What we do is take the native capability of a machine to tell you the cost per mile of gas divided by the ton of product” or in a machine’s case to measure downtime and downtime cost, revenues the machine generated in a particular day and the machines efficiency. It doesn't matter if you’re hooked up to a nuclear reactor or a cheese shredder; the business model applies to everything. If you can measure things across time when you have the essence of a system that is a whole ‘nother aspect of manufacturing.

Something as creative as PlantQue shouldn’t be surprising coming from Control Concepts, since Control Concepts itself is the creation of someone who wanted to do something different. Joe Van De Hey, the company’s president, came upon the idea as he was retrofitting programmable logic controllers in the color room of Appleton Papers for his employer. Van De Hey worked for original equipment manufacturer companies, vendors and systems integrators while looking to do something that, in essence, told the customer that what the customer thought it needed wasn't always what the costumer needed.

Control Concepts uses this chart to describe what the company does. The company touts its “client-centered long-term approach. We do not just design and install a system. We support our customers until they are completely satisfied that their system is functioning properly.” the company also announces on its website “our current customer base has priority over new customers.”

“I wanted to be successful, I wanted to do a lot of different things, and I wanted to do something different from what I sat out in the workforce.” He said. Most systems integrators at the time were rent-an-engineer companies that would hire consultants for a set number of hours, rather that hire someone to deal with a particular challenge. “What we try to do is listen to what they say and then offer a solution, you make sure that the projects right and then worry about the rest,” he said.

Ralph Clark, the company’s product manager and manufacturing systems architect, called that “repeat back with amplifications…almost universally they think they know what they need but it doesn't translate. Our proposals will always involve what we hope is an upgrade of what the customer proposed.” One example would be to upgrade a customer’s request for PLC upgrades by networking the machines, which Clark said, is something that most people look at when the project is proposed. Another example of how the company is different: employees are on the road less than 25 percent of the year while similar companies have their employees on the road 50 to 60 percent of the year.

Van De Hey markets the company to employees as a place where they would not have to spend days on end in hotels. “Everyone of our customers are potential employees and vice versa,” said Jerry Rowe, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “You get to see their work.”

Most of control concepts business is in the paper concerting industry with additional customers in pulp and paper, food and beverage companies, foundries, chemical companies, power plants and waste water treatment plants. Control concepts can work on company’s computers, operating systems, and supervisory control and data acquisition software, in addition to the interfaces between machines and their operators.

The company has worked with the major sellers of manufacturing control systems, including ControlView, Human machine interfaces, General Electric drives, Honeywell Distributed Control Systems, Novell and Windows networking platforms, and Rockwell Automation PLCs. Control Concepts also is affiliated with Microsoft, Rockwell Software and Siemens. Control Concepts presents customers with CDs that include the new software and all training materials in a framed photo. “We’re not there to take ownership-here’s the closing point,” said Clark.

Control Concepts seems to view itself less as a seller of technology than as a solver of problems, where technology is secondary, said Clark to “Open communications to help flesh out the entire scope of the problem and now lets show you how technology is the answer. The one thing that I’ve found unique about this company is it does turn down work. If the customer doesn’t understand, it’s not going to work. We have to qualify the customers as much as the customer qualifies us.”

“We look at its as standardizing standards, rather than standardizing products.” said Van De Hey. “You try to educate yourself on their processes and they need to educate themselves on what’s available. The key is not the product; it boils down to the relationships and people. If you get these match-ups up front, it’s hard to lose. You know your not going to get anywhere if its not working right.”

Control Concepts doesn’t seek to be the low cost provider or low bidder on a project. Van De Hey said the company uses a “bottoms up approach - you do the simple things, you win first, and then you proceed from there. If your sole objective is to sell X number of products, go sell on price. But if you want to be around in five or 10 years, you have to do it right. It’s sales and it’s our history as well,”

“Quality is what were really talking about” said Clark. “ Yes our cost may be greater but we strive to bring a much bigger benefit to the project.” Van De Hey sees Plantware and its feature product, PlantQue as a logical extension of Control Concepts approach. “If we take a bottoms up approach on machinery and understand that process very well this is the technology to measure these processes,” he said.

“Markets today are becoming more and more aggressive, and everybody has to make money. So we have to become part of this business; we have to make them more productive, we have to make them more profitable. You can make good business decisions with accurate data.”

Clark said PlantQue, which he called “capital investment insurance” and a “decision support system” exists to fill a niche that’s not recognized very well - what I refer to as the business aspect of manufacturing at the machine level. People assume something happens and they have these crude measurements. There continue to be process measurements, but those traditionally tend to be engineering or performance based levels as opposed to business measurements.”

The purpose of PlantQue is to measure what Clark called a set of metrics that’s identical no matter where I put it, customized for a particular machine and organized so the data (which is readable by a web browser program from any computer with web access) is presented in ‘little pails’ rather than a ‘firehose’ such as with a spreadsheet, and more accurately than humans can gather data. “It won't make it run faster but it will show you how fast you are running.” He said.

PlantQue replaces manual reporting which is only as accurate as the person filling out the report is. As Rowe put it reports are not always “an accurate indicator of downtime.” and error rate of 20 percent is considered good in manual data inputting’ 40 percent is not atypical. In one case, for instance a company discovered a machine was running less than half the time downtime reports indicated it was running.

“Machine downtime is extremely costly,” said Rowe. “You’re not producing a product; your not making money for the company and you've got to know why.

“We get resistance because they think they already know. We’ve gotten machine builders who say, we don’t want to know how we shape up to the competition.”

“It is kind of like big brother is watching you,” said Van De Hey, who said the software also can be used to discover maintenance issues and production issues that aren’t tied to operations. “We don’t want to chase after the labor issue but we do want to chase after the inconvenience. You have to be able to measure what’s happening. Once you define what you need, you can have it on your desk every morning by 7 o’clock.”

“If you can show them hard numbers this is what you can save it's not hard to sell” said Control Concepts Marv Wall. “If you can put it in black and white, its a lit easier to justify.”

“I think how we close is key; its everything” said Van De Hey. “Our mission statement is to make every project a showcase.” In one application, PlantQue can be used to measure the production levels of individual operators of particular machines over time to allow the company to determine if one operator as unusually high downtime or atypically low production and then retrain that employee to improve performance.

“You have to nail down operations before you can use this tool to see improvements” said Control Concepts' Tom Schroeder.

“It does give the customers a lot of different ways to view data that they’re not doing not,” said Rowe. “We also want to provide them with something they can maintain and keep up on their own. We don’t want to create a monster that only we can support.” PlantQue also measures faster than the machines operators can. One customer had a machine on which PlantQue was used and where it was not used. The second machine required the operator to devote two hours per day to accumulate data over a six-month period. The first machines operator required a total of 1 and 1/2 to get six months of data.

PlantQue can be designed to be used by multiple levels of users - from the machine floor operator to measure the machines work over one shift, to the superintendent to measure the machines work over one day, to the front office to measure the machines production during runs of products. “we want to be the foundations system for the enterprise resource planning systems of the world” by producing hard facts- hard uninterrupted, unfledged” said Clark. also can be used with the increasingly popular six sigma quality improvement program developed by a consortium that included Motorola, Six Sigma uses a statistical approach to improving quality to six sigmas - or about three defects per million products - from the process mean by reducing variation. The first step in Six Sigma Clark said, is to get accurate measurements of data.

Rowe believes consulting is a logical next step for Plantware. “The key to this is you have the greatest reports in the world, but unless somebody puts to use it's useless.” he said. “Control Concepts Corp. is always going to be the integrator and Plantware is always going to be the software provider on the PlantQue side” said Van De Hey.