Schneider Electric recently worked with a leading Eastern Cape dairy to upgrade its control system.
Woodlands Dairy, one of the largest manufacturers in South Africa in dairy farming plant, food and beverage, bought a second-hand powder plant from Denmark but its control system was outdated and not suitable for the modifications required to adapt the process to the company’s specifications.
Top of the agenda was a single platform that could integrate all the disparate plants on site, preserve past investments in expensive assets and legacy systems, while making provision for future expansion.
The ArchestrA System Platform, consisting of the Application Server, InTouch HMI, Historian and Historian Clients trending and reporting tool, was selected, as the company had previous experience with its products.
Other reasons included universal data connectivity which would cope with Woodlands Dairy’s variety of PLCs and object orientated technology that was more maintainable than its alternative as well promoting standardisation. Further benefits of the system included the ease of creating reports and retrieving historical data, full redundancy, scalability and the level of support available in South Africa.
The total implementation took about six months, half of which was spent on the new powder plant, which was commissioned first. While the powder plant was a greenfields project, the processing plant upgrade and expansion was done live, during weekly shutdowns and the standards developed for the powder plant were rolled out for these projects.
Other process areas were also upgraded. These included a new Clean in Place (CIP) Station, a new cream pasteuriser/butter plant, an upgrade to the milk pasteuriser, new pasteurised milk silo and milk lines, new pasteurised cream silo and a new milk reception area with its own CIP station.