American Sugar Refining has been growing recently through acquisitions. This growth, coupled with our aging first generation digital automation systems, creates opportunities for the collaborative design of a new enterprise control system network. Promoting commonality allows us to multiply our effectiveness in the development, deployment and support of this new platform.Each refinery has provided their own vision for how to automate and control their processes and staffed accordingly. These choices included which OEM to use for both software and hardware. While there are exceptions, the protocols and programming techniques have also varied greatly between locations.Collaboration with the Information Technology group has not been mission critical in the past. However, integration allows us to leverage portions of the existing hardware infrastructure, technical experience, and overall support structure of the Information Technology group. Control resources, once dedicated to support local network infrastructure, are now relieved from this responsibility. They now focus their talents on process control visualization and design where there is greater value. We have moved to a "collective knowledge" model where collaboration and information sharing is encouraged. Unique skill sets are distributed among team members with each individual becoming an expert in at least one field. The creation of more "Specialists" and fewer "Generalists" across the group eliminates redundant activities in the area of training, research, and implementation.The overall objective is the creation of an Enterprise Management System. Our goal is an adaptive business model of the process where key metric indicators are available and some of the variable costs of manufacturing can be controlled in real time.
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