Chassis Line Treatment Plant

Business challenge

Metalsa needed a chassis treatment line brought under unified control for a Toyota programme, on a site eight thousand kilometres from the engineering team that would design it. The commissioning window was fixed by the plant's production calendar and could not move. Any control philosophy that required iterative on-site debugging would have consumed the window before the line ran a single part.

Engineering approach

Ivevane treated distance as a design constraint rather than a delivery problem. The full control philosophy, safety case and network architecture were completed in South Africa, then validated against a simulation model of the line before any hardware shipped. Panels were built, wired and factory-acceptance tested in Boksburg so that what arrived in Guanajuato had already been proven as a system.

Implementation

Two engineers travelled for the commissioning window; the rest of the team supported remotely across a seven-hour time difference. Loop checks and sequence testing followed the schedule established during virtual commissioning, which meant site time was spent confirming behaviour rather than discovering it. Operator handover was conducted in-plant with local maintenance staff before the team demobilised.

Outcome

The line was handed over inside its commissioning window with the treatment sequence running to specification. Faults that would normally surface during live commissioning had been found and corrected against the model weeks earlier, on a different continent.

Business benefits

• Commissioning completed within the fixed production window
• Control faults resolved pre-shipment rather than on the live line
• Single engineering partner across design, build and commissioning
• Established a repeatable model for cross-border delivery

Future expansion

The control architecture was specified with spare I/O capacity and network headroom, so additional treatment stages can be added without re-architecting the system or revisiting the safety case.