PolyOne Deploys OSIsoft’s PI System and RLINK Interfacing to Integrate Real-Time Plant Production Data with SAP R/3 System

Overview:

PolyOne Corporation is the world’s largest polymer services company,manufacturing thermoplastic compounds, specialty resins, specialty polymer formulations, engineered films, color and additive systems, rubber compounding and thermoplastic resins. This broad range of products is used by manufacturers worldwide to make everything from tires to automotive components, building materials, appliances, medical products, packaging, office supplies and more. With such a wide range of products that are used by so many customers around the world, it’s critical to the success of this $2.5 billion company that their production operations be agile and flexible. The goal is to be so efficient in production operations that PolyOne can respond quickly to make exactly the products customers need without building huge inventories of products awaiting orders and shipment.

A critical element in achieving that efficiency has been a corporate program to provide a real-time data link between the company’s plant-floor control systems and its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Dubbed projectOne, the program was launched not long after PolyOne was formed through the merger of the Geon Company and M.A. Hanna Company, in September 2000.

Many of the two companies’ plants were already using shop floor control systems, manufacturing execution systems (MES) and SAP’s R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. There were differences among their implementations, however, and management of the new corporate entity wanted to standardize on company-wide solutions as well as to link the plant floor to the enterprise systems in real time.