New SCADA Improves Productivity for Biomanufacturing Company

PROJECT SUMMARY:

National Resilience Inc. offers a broad mix of customized manufacturing and development capabilities at their Mississauga, Ontario facility to serve the needs of biopharmaceutical companies at all stages of the drug development process – from pre-clinical development to commercial supply. Resilience requested Grantek’s assistance to develop an Ignition SCADA to support new GMP manufacturing processes in the building area known as the “H-Area.” This solution was needed to rapidly scale a brownfield contract pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, allowing Resilience to maximize their productivity and meet their commercialization goals.

PROBLEM:

National Resilience Inc. offers a broad mix of customized manufacturing and development capabilities at their Mississauga, ON, facility to serve the needs of biopharmaceutical companies at all stages of the drug development process – from pre-clinical development to commercial supply. Resilience requested Grantek’s assistance to develop an Ignition SCADA to support new GMP manufacturing processes in the building area known as the “H-Area.” This solution was needed to rapidly scale a brownfield contract pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, allowing Resilience to maximize their productivity and meet their commercialization goals. With Resilience focused on broadening access to complex medicines, this solution needed to come online as soon as possible. This urgency was heightened as the COVID-19 pandemic and global military conflicts increased the threat to supply chains. Resilience’s clients rely on them to contract and manufacture important pharmaceuticals that help improve and maintain the health of patients across the globe. Ignition SCADA is a vital need to ensure operations function efficiently and these pharmaceuticals are manufactured successfully while maintaining compliance.

SOLUTION: 

Grantek reviewed the UX development including the overall look and feel of the Ignition Perspective SCADA user interface with all stakeholders prior to beginning SCADA development. This review was part of the ongoing preliminary engineering engagement. Grantek also suggested milestone design reviews at the 30%, 60%, and 90% stages of the H-Area SCADA development. All functionalities were based on the approved Grantek Functional Specification (FS). 

Grantek believes a proper Ignition-centric deployment model should include both an immutable component (verified via digital signature) of the software installation and base-level configuration, as well as a version-controlled mutable component. National Resilience Inc. agreed with this belief and realized the benefit this would provide to their overall operations. To do this Grantek developed the Ignition SCADA application and a new PLC program for direct control of the water valves for the 5 POU stations in the Upstream, Downstream, and Formulation Areas. The new SCADA/PLC coordinates directly with the existing Water Manager PLC (PU70) for Water for Injections (WFI) request/authorization functionality. Grantek also updated the PU70 PLC program to include the new POUs in its water manager prioritization system. 

Grantek developed the Ignition SCADA application for direct connection to ethernet enabled OEM equipment and will account for the new SCADA platform will use Ignition across Development, Test, and Production environments, with the Test and Production environments implemented on redundant Ignition gateways. This allows for the solution to evolve in the future, as it could see the three environments be connected to an enterprise-wide cloud-based instance of Ignition. The new SCADA platform supports WiFi distribution as well as data acquisition and monitoring of OEM production equipment and instrumentation. This solution has hardwired connections via the new remote I/O panels for visualization and logging of process values and states. To do this, National Resilience Inc. provided a finalized list of tags per equipment category for integration into the SCADA system. Grantek provisioned a Git-backed version control system to track mutable changes and worked with National Resilience Inc. to define procedures for tracking and approving resource modifications.

RESULTS:

The SCADA solution Grantek provided in the “H-Area” was able to utilize Ignition to not only deliver results, but also integrate with other aspects of the facility. By using a unified software solution like Ignition, National Resilience Inc. also has access to data that can be leveraged in future projects at their other North American facilities. The solution Grantek delivered included over 5,800 tags and 390 alarms. The solution also logged over 4,600 tags in OSI PI Historian. 17 total devices were used in this solution, including Rockwell Automation, Siemens and Delta V – with all communications done via Kepware. Ignition provides a single point of reference for all of their OEM production equipment, no matter the supplier. A redundant, on-site, standard Ignition architecture was utilized, with the ability to publish to cloud gateway. A Microsoft SQL Server Cluster database was selected, including OSI PI in Redundant configuration. While PI is the historian, Ignition is the reporting tool chosen to present that historical data.

Grantek’s solution is helping National Resilience Inc. quickly scale up their unique brownfield contract pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. The result will see National Resilience Inc. produce pharmaceuticals and vaccines available to patients all over the world, especially important as the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain issues continue to hamper the timely access to needed medications.

DEPLOY DATE: April 2022