The new mixer was equipped with an HMI which ECS decommissioned and then programmed the existing mixer 2 HMI to operate both mixers. The mixer was the same type as that being operated in the line, but the company wanted the controls to operate in the same way as those for the existing mixer 2. The company had purchased a new mixer from Peerless Food Equipment and required assistance with its’ installation into the breadcrumb 1 line and modification to the controls. Assistance was also requested to reconfigure two lines the aforementioned breadcrumb line 1 & an additional bread crumb line. The company had purchased the same type of mixer that is presently used in production but wanted the controls to operate in the same way as those in the existing mixer.
Posted In: Case Studies, FactoryTalk Batch, Food IndustryĬase Study: Upgrades for a Large Taste & Nutrition CompanyĪ large taste and nutrition company that produces flavored breadcrumbs requested assistance from ECS Solutions to install and upgrade a mixer associated with their breadcrumb line 1. The customer’s management felt that ECS had to dig in and truly understand the very complicated Proprietary application and how critical it was to their operations.
ECS engineers recommended that since the client was running FactoryTalkBatch in their operations, simply adding the Material Manager feature, which is a free add-on with FactoryTalkBatch, the required functions would be obtained.
The problem became how to obtain the functionality of the Proprietary application in something that was more manageable, accessible for troubleshooting, and ideally “off-the-shelf”.
The customer approached ECS Solutions to undertake a review of the Proprietary application and recommend how it may be replaced or rewritten.ĮCS engineers quickly recognized that Proprietary was a custom application, written in Microsoft access with a significant amount of custom VBA code incorporated into FactoryTalkView. The application/program has become difficult to support and maintain. Simply put, insufficient interoperability can endanger both public health and an organization’s bottom line.įor many years, a large nutrition company used a Proprietary program that was developed in-house, to manage the recipe database and to calculate the mass balances of the ingredients to meet the nutritional profile of each product. It doesn’t matter if it’s food or if it’s medicine,” said John Parraga of ECS Solutions. In terms of the automation solution, it will look the same to us. “The way we’ve been doing things for a long time is based on our pharmaceutical experience and seeing how food and pharmaceutical are kind of like coming closer and closer. The market changes abruptly and often: recipes need to be reformulated to accommodate diet trends, the constant demand for innovative packaging to attract new customers, and seasonal variance of production requirements are all factors that must be considered.īeyond FDA and FSMA regulations, manufacturers must also take into account classification and segregation of allergens during formulation and equipment cleaning, a process that mirrors requirements in the pharmaceutical industry. Food and beverage manufacturers in particular face a variety of challenges that make an investment in automation and supervisory control essential to remaining competitive. In today’s world, automation is a necessity for all manufacturers. *Thank you to Inductive Automation for including us in this important piece! Posted In: Food Industry, Inductive Automationĥ Reasons Why Ignition is the Future of the Food & Beverage Industry The entire project required 73 conveyor sections, as well as turntables, driven by an Allen-Bradley ArmorStart VFD (variable frequency drive). The project was implemented in phases to limit any interference with production. The bulk of the work was the transfer of the pallets either down the line or into the line and onto two different areas where they could be picked up by fork trucks.
Material handling conveyors would be installed to move the product from the packaging lines, through the palletizers and stretch wrappers, and to common offloading areas.ĮCS was requested to provide controls on the entire system as well as establishing communications with the stretch wrappers and the palletizers. The existing configuration in the plant had four stretch wrappers and four palletizers being shared by the packaging lines and the company wanted a dedicated stretch wrapper and palletizer for each packaging line. Already producing 24/7, the packaging lines were restricted at the back end with palletizing and stretch wrapping.
With continually increasing demand, a large, packaged food manufacturer sought to increase the capacity on their 15 packaging lines. Case Study: Taking the Bottleneck out of the Packaging Line