Historian Implementation

AMPAC

Customer Background

AMPAC Fine Chemicals is a custom manufacturer of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs and Drug Substances) and registered intermediates for customers in the pharmaceutical industry. Their integrated facility in Sacramento, California, specializes in process development, scale-up, and cGMP-compliant production from kilograms to multi-ton quantities. With this incredible demand, they entrusted Enterprise Automation in late 2022 to design and implement a historian who can historize all historical operations data and keep and organize existing data.

Project Background

With their incredible demand, AMPAC Fine Chemicals utilizes a historian to store and validate process data. AMPAC recognized the need to modernize and update its data Historian and validation processes. They desired an upgraded historian that would improve efficiency, connect all their Citect clusters, and ensure data validation. To achieve this goal, they implemented two new historian VMs and connected them to their existing Citect sites. Enterprise Automation was brought in to complete the system’s upgrade, implementation, testing, and validation.

EA Solutions

EA’s work with AMPAC Fine Chemicals involved significant upgrades to their AVEVA Historian and Citect systems. EA and AMPAC Fine Chemicals worked collaboratively to build two VMs to store historical and alarm data redundantly in multiple locations in case of failure. All eight Citect clusters were connected to these machines to ensure data was connected, streamlined, and efficient.

The existing historian was not sized or licensed for the entire data they possessed, so a new system was built to allow for ten years of past data to be stored. Unlike the previous system, this allowed for flexibility in selecting what the end user wanted to historize instead of just historizing trend tags.

Enterprise Automation performed validation to provide evidence that the new system meets the client’s needs and confirmed the system met GMP requirements and guidelines. The communication between both teams went smoothly throughout, as EA worked closely with AMPAC’s engineering, IT, and Quality Assurance departments. There was a large amount of communication to ensure there was no data loss before installation, and the installation was done without any downtime or impact on production. Overall, the collaboration between AMPAC and Enterprise Automation resulted in a more efficient and validated data access system with improved redundancy and flexibility.