Wonderware Adds Improved Consistency, Increased Productivity and Higher Quality to the Mix for PVC Compound Fabricator

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• Discrete Manufacturing
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• Inventory Management

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PVC Compounders LLC, a manufacturer of PVC compounds in pellet form, faced several challenges in their operations. The company operates on a built-to-order model, keeping minimal inventory at their plant. This necessitated daily deliveries of raw materials and careful orchestration of the mixing process to ensure the right ingredients were incorporated at the right time. The company also had to manage extreme temperature fluctuations at their plant site in El Paso, Texas, which could affect the final product. Communication was another challenge, as many of their operators were non-native English speakers. The company's highest priority was ensuring that the recipe for each compound was accurate and consistent, and that plant operators had immediate access to these formulations.

PVC Compounders LLC is a manufacturer of PVC compounds in pellet form. The company is headquartered in Kendallville, Indiana and operates a satellite plant in El Paso, Texas. PVC Compounders produces the pellets used by manufacturers of wire and cable, injection molding and extrusion applications, resulting in the end products that we buy. Nearly every car sold in the United States contains flexible PVC made from the pellets produced by PVC Compounders. The company operates on a built-to-order model, keeping minimal inventory at their plant. Large bags containing fillers and other raw materials are delivered daily. Once these materials are in the plant, operators must orchestrate the mixing process to ensure that the right ingredients are brought from the silos and into the mixing line. After mixing, operators manage the cooling process and monitor the finished powder as it moves to the extruder. Each batch is finally formed into pellets, which are shipped out of the plant.

To address these challenges, PVC Compounders turned to Wonderware, a provider of industrial software solutions. Wonderware Central, a Wonderware authorized distributor, recommended a custom software solution based on the Wonderware System Platform. This platform could be rapidly deployed and integrated with existing systems, providing the capabilities needed by PVC Compounders with scalability for the future. The Wonderware software gave operators end-to-end control of the mixing line, facilitated more efficient batch processing, and provided easy access to accurate formulations in the database. The solution also linked the El Paso plant with the main plant in Indiana, providing a unified environment for visualization of the plant floor, plant history, device communications and automation application integration. The Wonderware Historian module collected and stored complete real-time and historical plant data, giving operators the accurate real-time data they needed to make adjustments to temperatures in the mixing process, the amperage of the mixing equipment and other parameters.

• Improved product consistency and reduced scrap
• Lower incidence of human error
• Better managed inventory

• Less than 1% internal failure
• Reduction in downtime by 15-20%
• Turnaround time for product reduced to less than one week on every order