These past four months, from January to May, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dometic, at their Vancouver facility. My role was to assist the machining and automation engineering departments in setting up a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, to monitor the numerous CNC mills and lathes at their facility.
The primary piece of software which I worked with was Ignition, which is a tool which interfaces with the OPC drivers provided by the manufacturers, facilitates logging of data to SQL server, and allows the creation of dashboards to monitor both current plant performance, as well as historical KPIS .
My primary projects were:
- Moving paper forms onto the Ignition platform, allowing easier access and analysis of operator submitted data.
- Creating training materials and providing training to operators on these tools.
- Creating a plant overview which can be accessed from mobile and web applications, allowing easier access of plant data to relevant employees.
- Using Ignition’s alarm system to set up an Andon, allowing critical issues to be quickly diagnosed and fixed.
- Automating daily emails related to plant performance, to provide proactive warning about possible quality issues.
I learned a great deal about practical considerations faces when developing software and systems for a manuafacturing environment, such as scalability, maintainability, and debugging.