Challenge
With over four decades of pioneering fibre production, Wellman International has supported the needs of the European and Global Nonwovens Market Place with their expertise and focus on specialist solutions in four key segmented areas of Hygiene & Healthcare, Technical Fibres, Automotive and Home & Apparel. Wellmann has also evolved into an 88KT fibre capacity manufacturer to become a European leader across multiple polymer and fibre types and the uninterrupted production and supply of these products is of critical importance to both Wellmann and its customers. An upgrade to the existing Balepress PLC system was already at an advanced stage of planning and this presented Wellmann with a number of key technical challenges.
- Wellman required the development of a middleware application that would manage the real-time communications between the new Balepress PLC system and their legacy AS400 manufacturing platform
- The company needed to identify and engage with a software specialist with expertise in the middleware software space
- The transition from the existing system to the new Balepress platform needed to be seamless with zero downtime or impact on production volumes or services
Solution
To address these challenges, Wellmann turned to the ERS IT Solutions team and their Team Konnect application development platform to provide the middleware and necessary technical capabilities to execute this project. ERS had first to engage with the Siemens PLC hardware partner to review the technical integration requirements in order to produce a comprehensive project scope document. This consultation, along with the flexibility provided by the Team Konnect platform was instrumental in the rapid development of the communication protocols necessary to deliver the final solution.
Results
Within 3 months, ERS had successfully completed the customisation and deployment of their Team Konnect platform to manage all middleware communications within the Wellmann Balpress production environment.
The rollout of the new middleware application was managed with zero
downtime and Wellmann now have the confidence of a platform that is
both robust and resilient and will provide the features required within their production environment for many years to come.
“The Team Konnect middleware development project has been a tremendous success, and the solution has now become a critical part of our daily production processes. The resources assigned to the project were of the highest calibre and it was a pleasure to deal with the development team at ERS throughout this project. We would highly recommend ERS and the Team Konnect platform to any business with middleware requirements
Brendan Costello – IT Manager
