Machine Builders - Solution

zenon in the manufacture of machinery and equipment

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Machinery and equipment are an ever-evolving market that constantly sees the emergence of new technologies, security challenges, data demands, and more. To remain competitive in the era of Industry 4.0, manufacturers need future-proof operating software for their machines that meets their changing needs and, ideally, also increases productivity while enhancing the products they offer to their customers.

zenon software is an innovative and secure platform for the machine building industry. From automated engineering to integrated reporting, discover how equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly using zenon to transform their customers’ manufacturing operations to help them grow their businesses.

The zenon platform has a range of features that ensure the efficient operation of machines and equipment within a plant context, but also of stand-alone machines.

The platform is present and producing efficiently in various industry sectors, including pharmaceutical, food and beverage, automotive, and others. When used for machine building, zenon offers unrivalled benefits in engineering, commissioning and during operation.

Engineering

By using zenon for machine building, engineering tasks become much more agile and flexible. With zenon, you can easily change the scope of the project according to your client’s needs, without virtually changing the amount of engineering hours. But how can machine builders benefit from zenon when completing engineering-related tasks? In fact, there are countless ways in which zenon can help, with automated engineering, version control and individual adaptation being just a few of the zenon features that help with engineering tasks. Learn more about how our software can help your team handle a variety of engineering operations:

Automatic engineering

Automated engineering helps today’s machine builders meet new challenges, such as customers who are increasingly demanding on customization, while still needing to keep costs down to stay competitive. With zenon, you use automated engineering to visualize and control designs for multiple machine versions. This reduces time to market and helps you stay ahead of the competition.

zenon handles the configuration of equipment and systems in a fully automated manner. zenon Engineering Studio allows you to automate repetitive tasks such as importing variables and creating graphics, even with several ready-made and tested commonly used elements available, significantly reducing the potential for errors. Or create your own smart, flexible objects and use them in your future projects. Thanks to zenon, complexity is now fully under control.

Modularization

Conventional production equipment is neither flexible nor efficient enough to meet the growing demand for customer-specific individualization, driven by the introduction of new products and an increase in their variants. This is where zenon comes in. With a modular approach to construction, machine builders can develop process equipment with more options for custom production.

Starting with version 8.20, zenon Engineering Studio has introduced Smart Objects, which can be used to make design engineering even simpler. These Smart Objects are composed of standardized functional units that go into all the module configurations and functions required to map a process component. Once you’ve created your Smart Object models, they can be grouped multiple times in your projects, with the links and objects being automatically generated by the software.

Decentralized intelligence for modular applications reduces engineering work through autonomous equipment modules and helps users react quickly to fluctuating market demands to stay competitive. Another key benefit of modularization comes down to the ability for a module to be used repeatedly, without having to be rewritten. Reusing existing modules doesn’t require high-cost new developments, potentially saving your company time and money.

Versioning

As you update projects, zenon automatically generates a comparison of consecutive versions of them. These comparisons make it easy to analyze the differences between projects, helping to ensure that you include the right features. No external programs are required, this service is fully integrated. In addition, zenon also passes on changes to external management projects using open interfaces such as XML. Using zenon’s version control capabilities, you can benefit from more transparent version administration that allows full traceability of any changes.

Connectivity

As technology advances, individual devices, industrial equipment, and even entire factories are becoming more connected. Through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), machines can communicate with each other to increase efficiency, reduce downtime, and provide valuable data to operators. Machine builders increasingly need to offer enhanced connectivity to their customers to enable them to take advantage of these advanced technologies.

zenon software helps facilitate this connectivity as it has its own drivers and protocols, as well as supporting more than 300 communication protocols and open interfaces, which allows it to connect seamlessly with most machines and systems. This allows the machines to communicate with each other as well as with other systems, ERPs, for example. While the customer’s machines communicate with each other, zenon’s OPC UA Server ensures that your data remains secure. zenon’s OPC UA Server is backed by a certification from the OPC Foundation.

In addition, zenon can serve as a basis for networked factories, as zenon-equipped machines can integrate seamlessly and securely into IIoT infrastructures. OEMs can offer this feature to their customers as a way for their equipment to outperform the competition.

Safety

Security is crucial to any engineering endeavor and industrial operations, and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) brings new challenges. At COPA-DATA, we ensure that security is an integral feature of our products, helping businesses stay safe throughout the lifecycle of a project. zenon has numerous out-of-the-box security features and can integrate with existing security systems. We have developed zenon in accordance with the requirements of IEC 62443, a safety standard for control system components.

zenon’s security features include 128-bit communication encryption, easily configured user authentication, and file signing, which allows zenon to recognize manipulated program files. Role-based user administration allows you to set the level of access in zenon Engineering Studio and Service Engine for any user in Active Directory. Changes to the Service Engine can be synchronized to Engineering Studio remotely in real time. There are 128 different access levels available. You can add as many users as you want.

zenon also offers continuous redundancy, which ensures that no data is lost if a computer fails. Even in the time between the breach and when the backup server takes over, perfect redundancy ensures zero data loss. Not having to worry about data loss is a huge plus for your engineering efforts, helping your team recover lost data quickly and stay on schedule. zenon redundancy is also easy to set up. All you must do is set the server and the server to standby.

Individual adaptation

With zenon, it’s easy to tailor the application, whether it’s a human-machine interface (HMI), a Plant Data Collection System (PDC), Line Management or a SCADA, to the individual using it. Users can, with just one click, switch between multiple languages and measurement units. Unicode support means that the software can adapt to a variety of countries, languages, and platforms.

The zenon Engineering Studio user interface is available in different languages, and you can use as many languages as you need in Service Engine, even at the configuration stage. This capability makes the system easier to use and allows for cooperation between facilities in multiple countries.

In addition to switching between languages, zenon can be adapted in many other ways to the needs of machine builders. For example, many users like how individual adaptation allows them to switch color palettes when they need to improve visualization or, for example, correlate the palette with the shift or with the product being produced, or even with the time. Other popular components of zenon’s individual tailoring features include the user’s ability to set up dashboards, create their own set of trends, and switch the way they navigate. Individual visual adaptation can contribute to the inclusion of individuals with certain degrees of visual impairment in this labor market. Individuals with color blindness, for example, can naturally operate a machine or process if, during their shift, the human-machine interface, instead of presenting the palette with colors, presents itself with shades of gray.

Commissioning

During the commissioning process, machine builders need to ensure that their products are properly designed, installed, and tested safely, operated correctly, and maintained responsibly. With zenon, you examine all the various components of the equipment and verify that each part is working properly. If a problem occurs within the system, with zenon it is very easy to identify its source. This way, problems can be isolated and corrected before they become costly and reduce the efficiency of your operations.

Network

Horizontal and vertical integration is crucial for creating a smart factory and enabling communication between machines and systems across the network. With zenon software, integration is very easy and fast, thanks to its more than 300 communication drivers available, even in environments with equipment from different manufacturers.

With zenon’s Hot Reload feature, technicians update designs at any time and activate changes without downtime. This allows them to adapt to new information and keep the system up to date without losing valuable time due to equipment shutdown.

Integrations with third-party systems

zenon also offers seamless integration with various third-party systems. The certified SAP ERP interface included in zenon, for example, makes it easy to connect the process level with the ERP, providing an overview of the entire organization, from order processing to production and delivery. The interface provides two-way communication between zenon and SAP, which means that zenon can provide the ERP with process information and receive control instructions from the ERP level as well.

In production

Easy to set up, integrate, use, and maintain, zenon is designed to be as user-friendly as possible so operators can focus on what really matters, production. Through features such as user-defined HMIs and Multi-Touch control, operation becomes more intuitive. Reports are built into zenon, and recipe templates make machine control easier and more efficient.

Learn more about the numerous features your customer can employ using zenon in their day-to-day operations:

Customizable human-machine interfaces

HMIs serve as the interface between operators and the machines they work with, making them crucial for the user-friendly operation of the machine. As customization becomes more common in the industrial sector, customers increasingly want HMIs tailored to their equipment. If a customer approaches a machine builder like you with a specific vision in mind, zenon makes it easy for you to bring that vision to life.

In addition to customized HMIs for each customer, zenon also allows you to offer user-defined HMIs through their adaptability according to individual needs and preferences. With zenon, users can easily change display colors, languages, and measurement units, and rearrange widgets to customize the dashboard. You can also create different dashboards, with different permissions and settings, for different user levels.

Smart Checklist

zenon Smart Checklist provides a convenient replacement for the paper list in testing processes. The Smart Checklist in zenon significantly reduces the possibility of errors, as users are required to complete each step thoroughly before moving forward. The program also guides them through the checklist according to the ISA-88 standard, making it easier to prove a machine’s compliance. In addition, the feature works on PCs, laptops, and smartphones, making it possible to acquire data from wherever you are.

Recipes

Machine builders need flexibility and customization capabilities when it comes to recipes. They may need to make changes frequently to meet the demands of their customers. Customized approaches to revenue management can also help differentiate a particular solution from the competition

With zenon, users define how they manage recipes without extra programming or additional software. The program offers models that allow for rapid engineering as well as extensive flexibility. They can easily set the status of a recipe according to their needs and set their own status handling rules. In addition, they easily import recipes from other systems and export them as needed. The handling of the recipe at zenon also complies with international safety specifications.

Reporting

Reporting is key to improving plant performance, reducing costs, and gaining a competitive advantage. With zenon, machine builders can offer their customers intuitive and customizable reports with minimal effort.

zenon makes it easy to display important information related to production batches, energy consumption and more directly on a machine’s operator panel. Fully integrated with zenon, operators benefit from custom reports with minimal engineering and no additional software tools. Reports are also displayed in a user-friendly and easy-to-read format, helping operators improve machine performance.

Product Life Cycle

At COPA-DATA, we are constantly updating our software platform to ensure that it keeps up with the changing demands of our key industries. We offer regular updates and take steps to give users as much flexibility as possible and ensure that updates go smoothly. In this way, we also ensure that all new versions of zenon are backwards compatible. This means that machines running the latest version of the software can still communicate with those running an older version.

Users easily convert projects to the latest version of zenon without risk of loss. You can also create projects in Engineering Studio in the current version that are backwards compatible. This means that even when you upgrade machines or software, projects can continue to run without interruption.