Case Study – Ingredients Manufacturing

by: Kelly Treml 6-1-15

Problem: Customer lost product due to occasional cooling failure.

Observations: Coordinated efforts with customer to develop a solution to prevent this from happening again.  The customer makes a product that is very temperature sensitive at certain times in the production sequence.  If the product does not cool down in a certain amount of time (usually during the overnight hours) the product can be ruined.  When the employees arrive in the morning the product could be bad without anyone knowing.

Solution: Customer had a remote call out system in place for some very basic call outs.  Added PLC programming code to their SLC 5/05 and configured their existing Wonderware SCADA system to allow supervisors access to the new alarm set points.  Integrated new timers into the PLC / HMI system that when the process went into heat/cooling steps and the supervisor’s settable time had  not been met, it would trigger an alarm on the Wonderware system. The  WIN-911 alarm software was integrated to call out or text the person who was on-call to insure that expensive product was not lost.

Results: The customer contacted  me 2 weeks later to say that their cooling solenoid had failed again, but this time, with the phone call at 2 am,  he and the maintenance person were able to go into the plant at that time and save the product from being ruined.  He also said that the one batch savings had paid for the cost of having PJ Kortens come in and set this up. Overall this project has already paid for itself and the customer would like to look into adding more alarm call outs in the future.