Toll Brothers is the nation’s leading luxury home building company, with a commitment to quality and customer satisfaction for more than 40 years. Each Toll Brothers home offers a combination of quality materials and superior design, where every detail is meticulously crafted to create a customized home.

To develop the nation’s best homes, Toll Brothers studies designs worldwide and develops the most sophisticated customized options that have been structurally engineered by the company’s in-house engineering division. In addition, the company has established manufacturing and distribution facilities strategically located in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, Emporia, Virginia and Knox, Indiana. Toll Brothers manufactures home components (wall panels, trusses, millwork) and distributes building materials in order to achieve “Just In Time” (JIT) delivery. They are planning expansion into the Southern states in the future.

The company is currently building homes in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

One of the items manufactured at the plants are wall panels, which consists of framing a wall, sheeting it and cutting out the openings. Elements of the production line include everything from handling the raw lumber all the way to banding 8-foot stacks of walls and shipping them to the various locations where homes are being built. This process saves some time over conventional stick framing, but more importantly assures wall integrity and quality.

“Our manufacturing process provides quality assurance,” said Patrick Duffy, Production Engineer, Toll Integrated Systems, a division of Toll Brothers, Inc. “Providing a high level of automation gives Toll Integrated Systems the capacity and scalability needed to keep up with the sales divisions of Toll Brothers. Automation insures product integrity.”

Today’s production and process environments share one important trait – they are only as effective as the quality of the data they are built upon. In order to truly understand and control operations, companies must be able to trust that the data is fully accurate, relevant and up to date. Furthermore, it must be able to be shared with users across your enterprise, particularly in multi-plant operations.

Toll Brothers has been working with GE Fanuc since 2001 and employs Proficy HMI/SCADA – CIMPLICITY and GE Fanuc Series 90-30 PLCs to control the production lines that build the panels (walls). As part of GE Fanuc’s Proficy family of software and solutions, CIMPLICITY provides an open system design approach, a true client/server architecture, and the latest web technologies, to allow companies to realize the benefits of digitization for the collection, monitoring, supervisory control and sharing of critical process and production data throughout manufacturing operations.

Getting Ready For An Upgrade In the past,

Toll Brothers has been tied to one Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system used for product plans and drawings that runs on UNIX, which isn’t being updated any longer. The output from the CAD system was a text file (CDT) that couldn’t be read by the line run by CIMPLICITY. Toll Brothers knew that it was time to migrate to another software package that runs on Autodesk AutoCAD in the Microsoft® Windows® environment. However, they weren’t necessarily ready to transfer everything all at once and no fixed timeframe was set for a transition.

The current GE Fanuc/Toll Brothers project started with automating the line at the Morrisville plant. The company had been working with a vendor/integrator from Sweden, AQ Elautomatik, which originally configured and implemented the CIMPLICITY project and programmed all of the plant’s PLCs. The integrator used the CDT files for continuity.

“Up until now they really haven’t had anyone who is familiar with CIMPLICITY and PLCs,” said Bill Shaw, GE Fanuc Professional Services Field Engineer. “They were totally dependent on the European integrator. Since Patrick has come on, he’s been driving his group to understand how the system works.”

GE Fanuc’s global Professional Services team offers a complete array of project services driven by Six Sigma quality methodologies to help put the full potential of our powerful software and hardware applications to work. Shaw was brought in on the Toll Brothers project implementation to provide the company with proven design capabilities, specification and implementation, as well as post implementation support of GE Fanuc software and control solutions to ensure maximum ROI.

“Bill Shaw modified our CIMPLICITY system by adding a Microsoft SQL database which provided us with much more flexible integration points,” said Toll Brothers’ Duffy. “Before, we were married to one CAD program, which in turn limited our manufacturing capability to that of a single ASCII text file. Now, we can create SQL database links to our CIMPLICITY projects, which are much faster and more flexible than the file transfers. The system works perfectly and troubleshooting the manufacturing process is easier than ever!”

GE Fanuc’s Shaw rewrote the project in CIMPLICITY to create a transition solution so the SCADA layer could get the data from a database (Microsoft SQL) and process it to send to the line independent of the CAD program. This program is strictly custom-written with the main purpose of opening up files. It encompassed rewriting about 40 or 50 scripts to accomplish the task.

“The original scripts that were provided by our European vendor were extremely difficult to understand,” said Duffy. “Having Bill Shaw rewrite the scripts has contributed considerably to the uptime at the plants.”

Making A Move

Toll Brothers’ newest plant is in Knox, Indiana. To get started there, the company’s original automated line equipment was moved from the Morrisville, Pennsylvania plant to Indiana. New equipment was ordered for Morrisville.

“We had a great experience with both the GE application engineers and our local GE Fanuc distributor Advent Electric Inc. of Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, said Duffy. “Advent not only provided excellent onsite engineering services throughout the entire project, but also supplied the control components needed to refurbish dozens of electrical cabinets.

“We went on line with a machine that Bill worked with in Pennsylvania,” he said. “We shipped it out to Indiana without a hiccup. We put a $5 million machine together and nothing missed. It was amazing.

“The panel line was scheduled to be the last system brought up on line at the Knox, Indiana plant, and we delivered the upgraded and fully functioning project, on time and on budget.”

“When we were starting the implementation in the Knox plant and reconfiguring CIMPLICITY to work with the new system, we had to reconfigure the IP addresses,” said GE Fanuc’s Shaw. “We found a problem and realized out that one of the IP addresses was controlling a PLC located in the Morrisville plant. It could have been a big problem. We immediately pulled resources from GE Fanuc on the fly and got my colleague, Tom Gardiner on the phone to provide Toll personnel with some network consultation.”

CIMPLICITY’s open communications strategy enables you to connect to hundreds of other systems and devices. Through native drivers and standard communication interfaces such as OPC, you are capable of collecting data from virtually any third party device. The product’s true client/server architecture provides for this data collection, as well as the seamless sharing of the information out to multiple users or other plant systems.

“The reliability and accuracy of the machine allows us to build a bigger variety of walls,” said Duffy. “We can schedule better because we know what the machine can do. We know we build thirty 10 by 16 foot panels per hour and that translates into over 90 luxury homes per week out of any of our machines. Some of these are more than 4,000 square feet. If we did this manually, our facilities would have to be 50 times bigger.

“We were the first in North America to engineer and build home components this way. We were struggling through the first four or five years until we found GE. But now our partner has us on solid ground,” said Manfred Marotta, Vice President, Toll Integrated Systems.

The company has taken advantage of training offered by GE Fanuc as it applies to their application. They are eager to learn how their system really works so they don’t need to be reliant upon integrators to solve minor issues. To that end, the company has signed up for GlobalCare Enterprise edition for easy upgrades and 24-hour service. They even have instant access to Bill Shaw and Dave Merker, who carry pagers should a problem arise.

“We are very happy with support,” said Toll Brothers’ Duffy. “I feel we are taking advantage of everything from upgrading all of our CIMPLICITY packages to being linked up to our favorite service folks. GlobalCare is an easy, painless way to pay for services without creating a huge project. Having a GlobalCare account is almost like having the best engineers working for Toll Brothers.”

Future Structure

Toll Brothers is actively and continually looking to improve their production operations and is working with GE Fanuc to get that done.

Duffy also intends to migrate the database application to Morrisville and Emporia, so they can use the Microsoft database as well.

In addition, Toll Brothers has an internal programmer developing a troubleshooting system inside of CIMPLICITY to assist with any downtime issues. And, the company is also utilizing the flexibility of CIMPLICITY to manage visibility into their system’s I/O – I/O at a glance. “The flexibility of CIMPLICITY ultimately reduces fiscal waste which, in turn improves customer and shareholder value,” said Duffy.

The company also plans to investigate expanding its solution with additional production management solutions from GE Fanuc including Proficy™ Historian and is considering deploying either Proficy Assembly for Discrete Industries or Proficy Plant Applications Production module. Both software-based solutions address manufacturing intelligence, execution and awareness by allowing businesses to improve operational efficiency and gain knowledge and control over real-time production operations.

“Toll Brothers is a good customer to work with,” said GE Fanuc’s Shaw. “They appreciate what we do there. We really haven’t had any issues.”