Moving mill operations data off on-site servers
Overview
Airodevs moved mill operations and historian data for one sawmill off an on-site server approaching end of life onto a cloud platform, keeping the existing control systems untouched while giving the mill's operations team remote access to live production data for the first time.
Client
A large Canadian lumber producer operating sawmills across North America, each running local control and historian servers that log machine speeds, production counts and downtime for every shift on site.
Challenge
The mill's historian ran on a local server with no remote access, so a regional operations manager visiting several mills had to be physically on site, or wait for an emailed report, to see current production data. The server itself was past the vendor's support window, and a single hardware failure risked losing weeks of historical production data with no off-site backup.
Solution
We moved the mill's historian and production data onto a cloud platform, built a secure connector from the existing control systems so no plant-floor equipment needed replacing, and set up automated off-site backup. Operations managers can now view any connected mill's live production data from a browser, and the mill's control systems kept running throughout the migration with no production downtime.
Areas of Impact
Regional operations reporting across connected mills, historian data backup and disaster recovery, the mill's shift handover briefing, which now references live data instead of a printed shift report, and IT's hardware maintenance workload for ageing on-site servers.
Results
planned production downtime during cutover down from an estimated 8 hours -> 0 hours
off-site backup coverage up from 0% -> 100% of historian records
mills with remote operations visibility up from 0 -> 5 after rollout
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Toronto, Ontario
Canada