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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Successful data integration efforts effect a perfect blend of technology, people, processes, and metrics for continuous improvement. |
Creating the perfect wine that blends a flavored bouquet of "ripe apple and pear with hints of butter, toasty oak, and spice" requires all the right conditions: the soil, the climate, the time of harvest. Then there's the crushing of the grapes, the fermentation, and the bottling. If all goes well it adds up to a top-selling super premium chardonnay. A consumer sipping the tasty libation is not likely to grasp the integrated effort required to produce the wine. But Andy Woehl is one person who fully understands what it takes to manufacture a great wine and, more importantly, the competitive need to improve the process. As the plant process engineer for vintner Clos du Bois (Geyserville, CA), Woehl over the last two years has focused on connecting all of the company's wine-making production systems in order to extract critical information from them. He's connected the barrel production system and the automated grape-crushing system using Rockwell Automation control technology and an Ethernet LAN. More recently, he's implemented bottling-line performance analysis software that works with Rockwell's manufacturing execution system (MES) to create sophisticated reports. [Click to continue] |