Centroflora Group monitors their factory floor & its power supply with Paessler PRTG

The challenge

Centroflora’s technologies and processes allow for the isolation, extraction, concentration, and drying of differentiated natural active ingredients, with assured quality and traceability. As a result, the company offers a wide variety of extracts from different regions of the planet to the market – with special attention to those derived from the Brazilian biodiversity – focusing on total sustainability and respect for the environment. Centroflora has always acted in line with the principles that are now known as ESG.

Currently, the company has its headquarters and main industrial plant in the city of Botucatu in the state of Sao Paulo. Across the state, they have a sales office, their innovation center called “CentroINOVA”. They also have another production plant in the city of Parnaíba, in Brazilian’s Northeast.

An organization fully aligned with the ESG model, Centroflora industrializes nature to deliver valuable supplies to pharmaceutical giants. Until recently, the high degree of automation was based on PLC networks distributed across three different production segments: evaporation, drying, and supply extraction. The company was looking for a way to gain a holistic view of those three environments to support the ongoing evolution of best practices for maintenance and facilities management.

Due to the segmented topology of the factory, the way to analyze PLC data was through visits by professionals from the maintenance team to those environments. Some faults could take hours to diagnose. Another important goal was to gain visibility into the quality of power consumed at the company's various sites. Determined to change this situation, Centroflora’s managers sought a platform for monitoring OT environments that would deliver a predictive view of the entire production environment, contributing to the support of critical business processes.

The solution

PRTG runs on a dedicated virtual server deployed at the Centroflora’s CentroINOVA data center. The platform monitors this environment as well as the entire factory at the headquarters. One of the critical points of the solution was to use an OT monitoring solution compatible with the company's PLCs – Siemens devices running the TIA Portal operating system, a robust solution that meets Centroflora’s needs. PRTG’s integration to TIA Portal streamlined the solution implementation process.

PRTG is currently the big dashboard of a network that starts on the countless PLCs operating on the Centroflora factory, goes on to supervisor microcomputers – traditional PCs that consolidate the data generated by the PLCs – and then goes on to the virtual server at the CentroINOVA data center.

To extend the value of PRTG to monitoring the power consumption used for Manufacturing, the company uses an appliance developed by Paessler's partner, RBS Service, that provides professional services to Centroflora. The appliance is a converter that transforms electrical current into a digital signal. This equipment provides PRTG with the data necessary for the facilities and maintenance team to gain predictive insight into possible failures in the power supply.

The benefits

Proactivity in resolving problems and incidents on the factory floor, and inconsistencies in the power supply were decisive for the adoption of PRTG. The facilities management and maintenance teams receive alerts about the status or unusual behavior of the industrial equipment controlled by Siemens PLCs. This allowed the time to diagnose an error to drop from 6 or 7 hours to just a few minutes. This careful look at the production environment also contributed to reducing power costs by 3% to 4%. Before the adoption of PRTG, equipment that should be offline could be unduly in operation. 

Regarding power management, the addition of PRTG and an appliance especially developed for Centroflora brought a predictive look at fluctuations in power supply to CentroINOVA and the headquarters. In addition to checking the input of external power sources, it is now possible to check what pieces of equipment of the Centroflora network depend on the external power grid and which devices are already being supported by the generator, and to act quickly to resolve any problems in this area.