Global digitalization project

January 21, 2021

Cementos Portland Valderrivas is a company of the FCC group dedicated to the manufacture and sale of cement, concrete, aggregates, mortar and other derivatives.

Within its global digitization project of different industrial plants in Spain, IDboxRT is proposed as a monitoring and integrating platform for all facilities, with the aim of creating a system that allows integration with SAP system data, reading of different types of files with analytical capacity for data visualization and connectivity with installed customer software, which makes it a collaborative tool within the corporation.

Main challenges

The main challenges encountered at the beginning of the project development focused on data acquisition, connectivity with the SAP system, extraction of historical data, as well as the creation of complex calculations for the FORTIA system and the synchronization of data transmission from the different systems.

Proposed solution

The starting point was seven Spanish plants, including also the data generated at the company’s headquarters.

The proposed solution was realized with the CIC IDboxRT Reporting Services system, LUCA, with the capacity to visualize the required data. On the one hand, production dashboards were needed through accumulated data by product type, and on the other hand, comparisons between the different plants of the company.

On the technical side, the project was developed in three areas depending on the data acquisition technology: through flat files extracted from SAP, Excel files from FORTIA and through the historical data tool, APIRest. For this purpose, three drivers were created for the collection of files in the shared directory. The data was loaded into the system and complex energy calculations of the grouped data were developed for later display on the platform.

Results obtained

As main results, the development of the project ensured the creation of Reports differentiated by the role of the users, the integrated acquisition of FORTIA data, as well as the generation of Reports that reduce the execution time of the tasks by the plant personnel and new data synchronization mechanisms. At the same time, a comparison of consumption and production results in the plants was developed, and access to data from different customer departments was generated from the same point.

Useful tips

To conclude, we would like to highlight several important conclusions for future developments: firstly, it is necessary to carry out data validation more efficiently, regardless of whether it is done by the customer or ourselves, since validation time may exceed development or implementation time; secondly, it is necessary to correctly capture customer requirements at the beginning of the project to reduce development time; and finally, it is necessary to seek and deliver a design that is better adapted to the company and brand image.