The adage “time is money” rings especially true for the factory automation industry. Manufacturing facilities are controlled environments where every aspect of production must be measured, analyzed, and refined to ensure product quality, safety, and to make the process as efficient as possible. Thus, even the shortest downtime can be extremely costly. A lapse in production can result in scrapped product, the inability to fulfill quotas, and delayed shipments. These very real concerns reinforce the importance of reliability in factory automation machines.

Industria Macchine Automatiche S.p.A. (IMA), a world leader in the design and manufacture of automatic machines for the processing and packaging of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food, tea and coffee, was experiencing data corruption in their machines. As a highly trusted company in the industry, with 41 manufacturing sites and about 5,500 employees worldwide, preventing customers from experiencing these issues was their top priority.

Some of the prototype machines using the FAT-compatible file system, DosFs for Vx-Works, on compact flash media were experiencing data corruption due to unexpected power loss. In the majority of cases, where only application data was affected, machines had to be re-calibrated before restoring them to service. The delays impacted production efficiency, and caused the loss of work-in-progress product. If that wasn’t bad enough, in nearly 10 percent of cases critical system data was also lost because the entire file system became corrupted. System data corruption rendered the prototype machines inoperable and required the implementation of a disaster recovery procedure. The worst-case scenario could leave a machine offline for several days while waiting for the new compact flash required to restore it to operation. The repercussions of a major stoppage in production like this would be catastrophic for a manufacturing facility.