For my second and third co-op terms I spent time in Greenville, North Carolina working at Patheon. Patheon, now a part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, runs a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant there and I chose to work at that plant to gain some experience working in controls engineering. I wanted to use this experience as a stepping stone towards applying to co-op at Tesla.
Fall 2018
Controls Engineering Intro
After I arrived in North Carolina I was assigned to work with the steriles automation team. They maintained the PLCs (programmable logic controller) which ran the machines on the steriles production lines for the entire building. These machines produced sterile medicine for injection, including the vial sterilization, filling, and capping processes.
Datacenter VM Maintenance
All of the HMIs (human machine interface) that operators used on the production lines were ran from a centralized virtual machine datacenter that my team also maintained. We used VMWare’s Enterprise vSphere software to control the creation of and monitor all of the virtual machines.
SCADA
SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) is a generic term used for software created for the purpose of running, interacting with, and monitoring PLCs and their associated machinery. There are a few widely used applications and Patheon used a combination of Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk suite and Inductive Automation’s Ignition.
Spring 2019
Black Box Integration
During the Spring I was moved to a different area of the plant. Here I was given a project to integrate a new-to-the-site data collection software with a machine on a manufacturing line that we currently had no access or insight to. This was a pretty involved project and took me the majority of the term as I had to go back and forth with the original manufacturers of the machine, figure out what hardware it ran on, and develop a plan that would let the validation team allow us to modify a machine running in production.
Advanced Ignition
The data collection software we used for the Black Box Integration was called Ignition by Inductive Automation. Ignition was designed as a SCADA system replacement for other systems, like Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk. I was able to create a fully functioning OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) tracker for the black box machine on our line with Ignition.
Non-Technical Skills
The pharmaceutical industry was new to me when I started this position and I really had no clue just how pervasive change restrictions would be. It took me a while to realize that some changes, while they would undoubtedly benefit the overall system, would just be too difficult or take too long to validate to be possible. I also had to learn that some people just wanted to maintain the system the way it was, without making improvements or major changes.