LAE Engineering: central management of safety and buildings in Heidelberg

LAE Engineering: central management of safety and buildings in Heidelberg. In recent years the printing company Heidelberger Druckmaschinen has installed an integrated building management system that was designed and installed by the LAE Engineering company of Nussloch. This major project covers 15 buildings in three of the machine manufacturer’s properties and includes, among other things, fire and intruder alarm systems, an alarm unit, intercom and video equipment and a building automation system.

The sight that met Head of Security at Heidelberger Druckmaschinen Bernd Baum every day in his control room was certainly impressive: 50 monitors, brimming with technology and staff engaged in all kinds of activities. Against the wall behind them were papers piling up, towering computers and clattering printers.

In short, a really motley collection of equipment ranging from fire and intruder alarm systems to building services. Baum was accordingly astonished when, one day, as he was visiting a factory, he was shown a plant control station. The process manager in charge there just pointed at a PC (which was switched off) and said, “There, that is our control station”.

This experience, a real eye-opener, stayed with him and developed into a vision of a true management system that would make documentation rapidly available and generate alerts automatically when things went wrong. Within a short time two new crucial acronyms had penetrated the safety world of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen: first of all “ZIG” and soon after “LAE”.

The Regeneration

Timetable ZIG (standing for Zukunft Integrale Gebäudetechnik, literally „futureintegral- building-technology“ in English) is the name of the Heidelberger project that was to permanently change the company’s safety structure. As Kai Zimmermann, the ZIG project manager, explains, the name of this in-house timetable has a completely new philosophy of safety and security at its heart.

“Building technology had to be network-based in future as we needed a system that had central fault management but was independent of location. The system also needed to include the production processes that needed supervision as well as the standard security features of building management such as alarm, intruder and access control. In order to put these ambitious ideas into practice we looked for a reliable partner and after searching everywhere we came across LAE Engineering, a company that already came with good references such as SAP, ABB, Steag and Bilfinger+Berger.

“What convinced us”, says Bernd Baum, “was the particular combination of services and the wide range of experience of the Nussloch company. We at Heidelberger were particularly impressed by the wide range of engineering skills at LAE. Although their team includes IT and security specialists, the focus is not just on these skills but on an impressive range of all the relevant engineering fields: control technology, automation, telecommunications, information technology, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and power engineering.

Versatile and All-embracing

The printing machine manufacturer found the price-performance ratio good, but what tipped the balance was the flexibility of the system, with its standardized OPC-based interface. According to Oliver Gutzeit, Business Development Manager at LAE, this is a technique that was introduced just after the turn of the century and makes all the individual systems that implement it open to integration at a higher level. It is achieved by what is known as open control station software, that is to say, software that connects “proprietary” systems, such as the software for individual security technology modules, to a higher level and enables it to be controlled independently of the manufacturer.

In this respect LAE is a systems company partner of PVIS software. LAE system integrators are based on a number of technologies (as at Heidelberger Druckmaschinen) and bring the separate engineering and security systems together under a unified management solution. This is critical for a whole range of scenarios. It enables data to be collected in a unified form and forwarded to the relevant locations, whether the event is a fire or, for example, an alarming temperature rise in the production plant.

Integrated, Ergonomic and Upgradable

The result at Heidelberger Druckmaschinen is the integration of process control, building automation, hazard management and remote control technology into a single system. In this way the control station becomes the service area for a wide variety of internal customers from the Safety, Production and IT departments.

Operation is now user-friendly and ergonomic, with a clearly structured screen. When an alarm is triggered, the screen reports the event and gives precise instructions for dealing with it. In addition, the entire site can be represented graphically on the screen and the exact location of the irregularity pinpointed using video cameras that can be remotely controlled from the control station. An all-embracing project such as this is of course a continual process that is always being improved and extended. For these purposes LAE also acts as an “engineering consultancy”.

The internal structures of a customer such as Heidelberger Druckmaschinen are subject to continuous change and the safety strategy needs to be monitored by specialists and adapted accordingly. At Heidelberger there are now more projects in hand, such as the integration of camera control on MMS and the inclusion of a new intercom station.

Process supervision, however, means above all personal contact and communication. Departments always need to be brought together, staff need to understand the need for change and people need to be convinced. As LAE project leader Sven Ebbinghaus points out, this is one of the duties that a chief engineer sometimes has to perform.

Matthias Erler

Contact:

LAE Engineering,
Nussloch/Heidelberg, Germany
Tel.: +49 6224 992226
Fax: +49 6224 992230
info@lae-online.de
www.lae-online.de