As a leading company in the crop protection industry, BASF has a track record of being a reliable partner to farmers for more than 100 years. The BASF portfolio is comprised of seeds and specifically selected plant traits, chemical and biological crop protection, solutions for soil management, plant health, pest control and digital farming. BASF is headquartered in Ludwigshafen,Germany, where it operates more than 200 of its global production sites, producing thousands of commercial products for different applications. The objective for their new project was to close the digital gap between their automation systems and therefore MOM / MES systems have been implemented by Siemens.

Siemens helped coordinate a BASF project team to provide technical and process knowledge and to implement the Siemens Opcenter. Using Opcenter allows BASF to increase manufacturing efficiency, flexibility and deliver excellent quality, all based on a state-of-the-art platform and app approach. Siemens developed a comprehensive integrated solution that helped the team link operational technologies (OT) with information technology (IT) to build a comprehensive digital twin of the production plant. It helped the team create an information hub that turns process orders it receives from the ERP software into control recipes it transfers to the process automation system. They also leveraged the software to send material or status acknowledgment messages to the ERP software. Using Opcenter, they created an MES that autonomously creates and sends sampling requests to the laboratory information management system (LIMS) and feeds analysis results from the LIMS back to the batch processing system. Using handheld scanners with a custom graphical user interface (GUI) supports processes requiring manual data acquisition, such as taking samples or recording expendables consumption. Using Opcenter Execution Process helped the team achieve digital coverage of the entire production process including packaging at the end of the lines. Workers there use handheld scanners to process filling checklists. Based on these entries, the MES also triggers the shipping processes in the ERP system, including label printing for the containers.The solution elimiates all manual data entry, which eliminates errors and delays. The resulting data consistency provides full production transparency and facilitates faster plant control reactions, improving process stability and product quality.