Case Study

World’s most automated seamless pipe-making

plant counts on Siemens portfolio, expertise,
and support to drive plant safety, quality
and efficiency

In recent years, the oil and gas industry The location is ideal. The $1.8 billion plant
worldwide has responded to severe covers 1.2 million square-feet and employs
market-pricing pressures by finding ways more than 600 people. It sits on 1,500 acres
to gain new efficiencies. That includes the in the heart of Texas oil country, near E&P
industry’s many thousands of suppliers, customers in the high-growth Permian
Customer: Tenaris, a leading
global supplier of tubes and large and small. Among those is Tenaris, Basin and Eagle Ford shale formations.
related services for the world’s a leading global manufacturer and supplier
After four years of construction, the facility
energy industry and other of steel piping and related services needed
completed commissioning and began
industrial applications. for exploration and production (E&P)
operations. The plant adds 600,000 tons
Challenge: Build the world’s
operations. Each year, the company’s
of seamless pipe-making capacity and
safest and most efficient plants in North America, South America,
services to the output from five other Tenaris
seamless pipe plant to serve Europe, and Eastern Hemisphere produce
facilities in the U.S. as well as the company’s
customers better. more than six million tons of steel pipes.
integrated global manufacturing network.
With a focused eye on plant safety while
Solution: Sole-source advanced
automation, networking, drive staying competitive and profitable, “We were excited that Siemens technology
and power technology, plus Tenaris is always seeking to drive greater could help solve the novel engineering
expertise, from Siemens, using production quality and efficiency. In 2017, challenges Tenaris faced with this innovative
the TIA Portal for programming. it achieved these goals with the opening of plant,” said Raj Batra, president of Siemens
Results: Improved testing its newest showcase plant, TenarisBayCity. Digital Factory USA. “The TenarisBayCity
throughput, visibility and Five years before, with about 40 percent plant is a testimony to the power of
safety, with a 50 percent return of its sales from North America, Tenaris digitalization for driving innovative
on investment. began planning the world’s largest and manufacturing into a new age.”
most automated seamless pipe making
plant for Bay City, Texas.

usa.siemens.com
Challenge: Build the world’s safest and
most efficient seamless pipe plant to serve
customers better
According to Pablo Fushimi, Tenaris Project Senior Director
providing for the safety of plant personnel and advanced
equipment was one of the plant’s three core design principles.
The other two were quality and efficiency. This was a challenge
for the plant’s design team.
“On the one hand, operators must be close to machinery and
inventory, whether it’s feedstock, work-in-progress or finished
goods, to monitor production quality and processes from end-
to-end, while remaining mobile to get to and from their stations
and work cells,” he says.

“Safety is our top priority in everything Tenaris BayCity seamless pipe plant sits on 1,500 acres and covers 1.2 million
square feet. It is the world’s largest automation implementation using the
we do. It guided the plant’s design and Siemens TIA Portal to program and manage nearly 50,000 IO points across
4,000 network nodes.
architecture from the very beginning
precisely because this is an industrial Virtual commissioning. Finally, Fushimi wanted to reduce, if
facility that makes seamless pipe.” not eliminate, the fits and starts that can typically plague the
commissioning phase of any new manufacturing facility. These
Ensuring quality from start to finish. In designing the plant, occur when components, machines and systems, especially
engineers made sure that every part of its operations would from different suppliers, are found to not “play well” together
support the company’s global adherence to the rigorous ISO because they’re difficult to integrate or don’t interoperate.
9001:2015 quality management system. The company has Another source of commissioning headaches is discovering
integrated these and other quality, health, safety, and the plant’s layout design and process architectures fall short
environmental standards into all its management practices of expectations.
worldwide. That’s why Tenaris can produce piping up to 26 “No matter what the source of a commissioning issue, resolving
meters in length with tolerances of less than 5 millimeters it takes a lot of time,” Fushimi says. “Our target was to bring the
and its products from source feedstock all the way through Bay City plant online timely, without sacrificing safety or quality.
to customer delivery. So, to streamline this final phase, we wanted to use software to
Maximizing asset utilization. Efficiency was the third design conduct test simulations of just about everything in a virtual
principle, which covers many different dimensions of the plant. environment before going to the real version – virtual
Those included asset utilization, production throughput and commissioning, if you will.”
visibility, plant reliability and energy-efficiency.
Solution: Sole-source advanced automation,
“To ensure we’re always getting the most out of the plant’s
physical assets of machinery, inventory, and skilled personnel, networking, drive and power technology,
maximizing uptime and availability would be critical,” plus expertise, from Siemens, using the TIA
Fushimi says. Portal software engineering framework for
“So, for all that, we needed extreme operational reliability,
programming
which meant system and network redundancy as well as To address these challenges and meet the plant’s operating
excellent diagnostics and maintenance capabilities. We also goals, Tenaris needed a fully automated approach for its
need operational visibility and the ability to track the production lines and inventory management. But few suppliers
provenance of every single pipe we make.” could qualify to help Tenaris with the complexity and scale of
that task. Fushimi and his team carefully considered a short list
As for energy-efficiency, Fushimi takes pride in pointing out
of candidates with a sufficiently broad and integrated product
the Bay City plant is seeking LEED (Leadership in Energy and
portfolio, proven expertise, and financial strength to do the job.
Environmental Design) certification. That readiness required
detailed planning in all the plant’s building and production They also wanted to sole-source as much as possible, so they
systems from the outset. could simplify and compress procurement cycles while later
ensuring one point of contact for commissioning, support,
“While Tenaris is one of the world’s largest suppliers to the
and service. Most of all, they sought to create a standardized
energy industry, we’re also 100 percent committed to
platform for Tenaris that would make it easier for maintenance
conserving our use of energy,” he says. “Beyond the cost
technicians and operators to diagnose and repair problems,
savings, it’s the right thing to do for our environment and
while also minimizing their spare parts stock. So, after
our future. Given the plant’s size and complexity, energy
evaluating their options for an automation partner, Tenaris
conservation was a big design challenge for us.”
chose Siemens.

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 “Siemens brought more to the
table – their portfolio of integrated
automation, drives, and power, plus
expertise that’s proven in large-scale
projects like ours over the world.”

Automation Director Nain Rivera explains the decision: To extend the plant’s automation reach across its vast expanse,
“Siemens brought more to the table – their portfolio of more than 4,000 ultra-compact, high-performance SIMATIC
integrated automation, drives, and power, plus expertise that’s ET-200 remote IO modules (S, M, and Pro models) were
proven in large-scale projects like ours over the world. A team deployed using a third-party’s simple, push-in wiring connectors,
of their experts in all these areas opened an office and lab on which saved up to 20 percent in commissioning time. In
the construction site, so when questions or issues arose, we addition, more than 150 Siemens SIMATIC HMI Comfort Panels
could address them right away. If an escalation was needed, were installed to provide personnel with color touchscreen
they had the right person readily available. As our strategic interfaces to the automation controls.
partner, Siemens also managed more than 40 global OEMs
and solution partners. That took a huge amount of risk out
of the project, and ultimately saved us months over the course Scanning pipes is easy with
of our multiyear build-out.” a smartphone or tablet.

TenarisBayCity Plant By the Numbers

SIMATIC Controllers 124
SIMATIC HMIs 156
SIMATIC Distributed IO 4,042
SINAMICS Drives 1,620
SIRIUS MCC Starters 176
SCALANCE Networking Devices 843
The SIMATIC automation system supports the efficient tracking
Network Nodes 4,000 and traceability of each pipe via 2D-code scanning as it’s fabricated
Total IO Signals 47,348 and enters finished goods inventory and eventually ships out. And,
to track tools, a SIMATIC RFID system was installed.
Vast network. PROFINET industrial Ethernet – supported by
Safety Integrated. The plant’s automation landscape features
more than 800 Siemens SCALANCE switches, wireless access
124 Siemens SIMATIC S7 Controllers from the Siemens Totally
points, and related devices – handle the plant’s communications
Integrated Automation (TIA) portfolio. Most are the advanced
requirements. “In all, we’ve connected more than 4,000
S7-1500F fail-safe models with integrated safety features.
PROFINET nodes, making our Bay City mill one of the largest
The built-in safety capabilities eliminated the cost and time
PROFINET implementations in the world,” Rivera says. “We’ve
of installing separate safety controllers across the plant.
deployed them in a ring network architecture for redundancy,
“The fail-safe SIMATIC S7-1500 Controllers have safety fully
using the Media Redundancy Protocol, which enables faster
integrated, which has enhanced our plant safety, while
recovery times in case of failures.”
increasing our operating visibility and management of the
SIMATIC control fabric across all our operations.”

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The unique Siemens iPCF (industrial Point Coordination software in years to come,” Fushimi adds. “Even more, we can
Function) technology enables IO communications over wireless share code with our many other facilities around the world
LANs (WLANs) as fast as 16 milliseconds to operate within the that use Siemens solutions.”
cycle times of the plant’s machines. “We deployed SCALANCE
X-500 managed Layer 3 switches to give us the ability to Results: Tenaris gains a digital showcase of
segment the plant’s large network into scores of sub-nets for integrated automation, drive systems, and
better manageability, visibility, and security,” Rivera says.
power ensuring efficiency and safety, along
Two specialized PROFINET extensions – PROFIsafe and with a flagship operating model for the Tenaris
PROFIenergy – are used in the plant’s network to more global manufacturing network
efficiently and effectively manage safety and energy
communications respectively. The first prioritizes safety- Fushimi’s observation about reusing TIA Portal code elsewhere
related messages over other network data traffic, providing in the Tenaris global manufacturing network offers a glimpse
up to Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 3 risk-reduction. The second into an even bigger potential dividend from the company’s
permits a coordinated, centralized shutdown of devices $1.8 billion investment in the Bay City plant. That is, the
during standby periods, such as nights and weekends. For a creation and cultivation of its own Industry 4.0 smart factory –
facility the size of Bay City and with the number of devices, the confluence of the Industrial Internet of Things within
this can save a lot of energy over time. its factories and across them around the world. “What we’ve
enabled at Bay City is a digital thread of data that provides
Drive time. In addition to the SIMATIC Controllers and greater operating visibility, speed, and continual optimization,
SCALANCE Network Infrastructure, Tenaris has deployed over especially via simulations,’ he says.
1600 SINAMICS drives. Some of the drives are installed on
cranes as part of a SIMOCRANE solution package that also As an example, Fushimi points to the virtual commissioning
includes sway control, CeNIT straight-run controls and a crane that he and his team were able to conduct in 3D software
management system (CMS). “Siemens also provided a great simulations before committing to the physical implementation
deal of training and remote support for starting up the of the plant’s machines and the automation, drives, and
drives,” Fushimi says. “Both helped minimize startup issues power infrastructure supporting them. In effect, his team was
and quickly resolve the few that did pop up.” able to create a digital twin of the plant’s automation controls,
drives, and power infrastructure that serves as a baseline
Tenaris also implemented a range of Siemens switchgear, initially, then an as-built model later – or a reference model
motor control cabinets, and other power distribution for upgrading other Tenaris plants or new-builds.
components. “The extent to which Siemens has engineered
integration and interoperability across its many different “Of course, we did all the factory acceptance testing required
automation, drives, and power components is impressive,” to prevent equipment from arriving out of spec or with
says Rivera. “And given the huge numbers we had to install, operating flaws, but that only goes so far,” he says. “With the
the interoperability plus sole-sourcing saved us an extraordinary Siemens gear and using the TIA Portal code, we were able to
amount of time in installation and commissioning.” build a 3D model of the plant and test all the Siemens
Controllers, drives, networks, IO, and other components in
Fushimi points to the Siemens TIA Portal, a common automation simulation before installation. We were able to make hundreds
software engineering framework, as another source of time of adjustments, which translated into significant time savings
savings. “With the TIA Portal, our engineering teams were in the commissioning phase, allowing us to open the plant
able to manage and reuse code across many different on time.”
applications, saving up to 30 percent of the time that would
otherwise be needed, if they didn’t have the ease of use of its Siemens’ innovative automation solutions portfolio, expertise,
graphical interface and code libraries,” he says. and support to drive plant efficiency, quality and safety,
enabled the Tenaris plant in Bay City, Texas, to be the world’s
“Not only has the TIA Portal saved us probably months over most automated seamless pipe-making plant.
this multiyear project, but it will also continue to save us
time in maintaining and upgrading the plant’s automation

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