The need for quality and data traceability in pharmaceutical manufacturing makes this a very special industry. Program specifications, change procedures and approval must follow FDA and GAP standards.ATS engineers have experience of these environments and a number of projects have been completed with PLC and SCADA systems.

The producer of a filter installation for a pharmaceutical industry asked ATS for help. For the filter in question it is required that process data is available at any time. A Siemens S7 400 PLC is used to control the system and Wonderware InTouch is used for SCADA.

The choice was to implement Wonderware InSQL Server and Active factory for visualisation, analysing and reporting the ‘real’ time and historical data. ATS was asked to implement InSQL Server plus Active Factory and take care of the communication between the PLC and the Wonderware applications.

With Active Factory it is possible to retrieve on-line data and historical data on basis of simple SQL queries. This can be done from any workstation connected to the network where InSQL server is located. Now it is possible for anyone with access rights to run his own report of the data available in the database server.
Amafilter References