ISA-88: The Shortest Path to Recipe Changes

FlexBatch® integrates recipe management with the manufacturing process by making the automation procedure part of the recipe. Developers, engineers and production staff can quickly develop and modify documented recipes, and immediately schedule them for production. Batch cycle times and life-cycle automation costs are reduced, recipes can be modified using class object libraries, and new and existing products are brought to market faster and at a lower cost, giving you strategic and financial advantages over your competitors.

Designed in accordance with the ISA-88 standard for batch control, FlexBatch reduces dependence on Control Engineers. It empowers recipe developers, and operations staff to make recipe, procedure and equipment changes via intuitive graphical tools. Production staff can create, modify, and manage batches or execute library procedures to overcome process upsets. They will not need a control engineer to adjust a batch in production or be stymied by difficult to understand programming at 3:00 a.m. All of which means a more nimble, responsive, and profitable process.

Empower Production Staff to:

• Quickly develop, scale-up and produce new products
• Adjust and adapt products to new customer demands
• Easily schedule and change production
• Allocate/De-allocate plant equipment on-the-fly
• Experiment with new recipes
• Create and execute campaigns
• Pre-schedule batches/campaigns
• Automatic batch sequencing
• Selection of equipment at run time

FlexBatch Delivers:

• Shorter time to first batch
• Increased throughput
• Increased production yield
• Faster changeover times
• Improved equipment utilization
• Lower engineering costs
• Reuse of software

Modular, Flexible and Efficient Batch Automation

To simplify the creation, maintenance and documentation of procedures, FlexBatch® uses the same graphical editor to create Procedure Charts for all aspects of production. FlexBatch extends the capability defined in ISA-88 with the ability to define complex transitions between entities, which greatly simplifies or eliminates much controller programming. The recipe developer can create phase and operation classes and store them in libraries. These are the reusable objects which the recipe developer inserts graphically into procedures.

Meanwhile, the control engineer can define the plant equipment and the equipment connections within FlexBatch. The actual phases are created using D/3® development tools. This modular approach to creating recipes and phases saves time, reduces testing and errors, and simplifies validation. Because procedures are part of the recipes, producing or modifying a recipe is simple and virtually error free.

Modify On-the-Fly

At any point during recipe development and execution, personnel can modify:

• Recipe Parameters (ex: Amount of enzyme to add)
• Recipe Procedure (ex: Don’t use agitator for this batch)
• Schedule (ex: Make 10 batches instead of 5)
• Batch Start Rules (ex: Start batch after a certain operation completes)
• Equipment Utilization (ex: Only use Kettle 2 for this batch)
• Scale Batch Amount (ex: 500kg instead of 200kg)