Toyota (UK) - Production Monitoring System

Highlights

MacDonald Humfrey (Automation) Ltd. delivered a replacement plant wide Production Monitoring System (PMS) to Toyota Motor Manufacturing (UK). To meet the process engineers requirements the PMS delivery included PMS Communications, Data Acquisition, Data Storage, Data Archiving, Web Page Serving and Data Publishing to Large Displays units throughout the Manufacturing offices.

The PMS system employs InSQL8.0 and MS SQL Server 2000 to acquire data from 28 -plant PLC’s and 6 - databases. All data is stored within the InSQL database structure. The means of displaying and reporting data is through ActiveFactory client and server tools that interface with InSQL to enable data to be viewed within an Excel Workbook, Word Document and published web pages. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is used to build all interfaces to the system and perform tasks such as updating calculated figures to the database and supply up to date information to the main PMS web page.

The PMS system has been designed to be completely open allowing PMS users (with appropriate security rights) to alter and develop the system in the future without the need for specialist knowledge. The main application chosen is Microsoft Excel, which all PMS users are familiar with.