EA Upgrades Siegfried’s Automation Platform, Decreasing Downtime 

Orange County Sanitation District

Customer Background

Siegfried is a worldwide company that provides products and tailor-made services that integrate seamlessly into a customer’s value chain. The company offers pharmaceutical industry partners a comprehensive range of services – from developing drug substances to product development, registration, manufacturing, packaging, and logistics. Siegfried approached Enterprise Automation in 2019 to audit and upgrade their control systems.

Project Background

The Siegfried Irvine facility is contracted to produce various pharmaceuticals within its production facility. This facility holds an array of equipment and services to support this purpose. The CIP SIP system is one of these, designed specifically to clean and sterilize equipment. The project scope was initially to audit their PLCs and determine which to replace, as several PLCs were beginning to disconnect frequently, leading to more downtime than Siegfried preferred. They also wanted to update their SCADA system from System Platform 2012 R2 to 2020 using high-performance graphics with OMI visualization engine.

After EA performed the audit, the project’s scope evolved, including replacing all end-of-life PLCs and platform upgrades to improve security working alongside their corporate IT group.

EA Solutions

Enterprise Automation proposed and executed this project to maximize efficiency and minimize the risk of human error in recording these actuation conditions. Understanding that reduced time meant reduced costs, this was the preferred path. Over the years, our team has developed several innovative tools to accelerate our workflows to deliver more value to our clients. One such tool is our InSpect framework which incorporates a proprietary algorithm for automating the process of interpreting and reverse engineering PLC programs.

For this project, our InSpect framework was deployed to automate the reverse engineering of the logic, which permits equipment assets (pumps, etc.) to run for all of OC SAN’s ProWORX NxT PLC programs. This tool was tested to show efficacy without errors and verified to operate at an average speed of 0.04 milliseconds per condition analyzed – several magnitudes faster than the original 90 seconds per condition for manual inspection by an engineer.