A worldwide production process is of utmost importance, since it increasingly encourages the industry to automate its processes to improve quality and productivity, reduce costs, increase operational safety, etc. In this frame, productivity is one of the most important factors to be competitive, which is related to working methods, efficient processes, continuous improvement, and the use or implementation of automation in production processes. In Ecuador, the polymer industries dedicated to the manufacture of paint lack automated processes, which causes delays in the delivery of production batches and a lack of standardization in cycle times. In particular, we focus on the Wesco S.A company dedicated to the manufacture and marketing of paints where the water borne paint is one of the most elaborate products in its portfolio. Despite being a product with an established standard formulation, it lacks automated controls in one of its main processes as the dispersion and mix process. It is currently managed through the activity and clearly operational experience of its operators, which causes delays in the delivery of production batches and waste of time, since each manufactured batch has an estimated time of 1 h and 30 min for the dispersion and mix process. In this paper, we propose implementing an automated design for controlling both dispersion and mix process, based on automated tools and industrial control through PLCs, in order to standardize cycle times, improve manufacturing efficiency, and thus productivity.
