Tight Production Monitoring Reduces “Give Away” on Coffee Packing Line
Challenge Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee Inc. is a leading Canadian owned and operated producer of quality tea and coffee products. The company added a new packing line to expand production of private labeled cans of coffee. The additional line consisted of used equipment which needed to be retrofitted with controls in order to be updated. A primary concern for the engineering team while implementing the control system for the new line was to reduce product give away by making package filling more precise and by enabling Mother Parkers personnel to be able to track waste. Production data for each shop order needed to be acquired and available from the company’s database.
Application Solution A single PLC on the line is used to control all phases of operation. The PLC reads data from an online scale, adjusts the revolution rate on a feed auger to control the amount of product dispensed, adjusts the speed of a filler unit and monitors the vibrator that settles product in the can. When a production run is finished, the PLC sets a Boolean flag indicating that the data is ready. The PC running the InduSoft interface detects the flag, picks up the production data and publishes it as a report to the database.
Since Mother Parkers had InduSoft installed, the most significant benefit is that staff can associate data with a specific production run so that it’s possible to tell precisely what costs are associated with a particular blend. It’s possible to hone in and see how much coffee is being given away inadvertently and get closer to target weights.
Tight Production Monitoring Reduces “Give Away” on Coffee Packing Line
Challenge
Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee Inc. is a leading Canadian owned and operated producer of quality tea and coffee products. The company added a new packing line to expand production of private labeled cans of coffee. The additional line consisted of used equipment which needed to be retrofitted with controls in order to be updated. A primary concern for the engineering team while implementing the control system for the new line was to reduce product give away by making package filling more precise and by enabling Mother Parkers personnel to be able to track waste. Production data for each shop order needed to be acquired and available from the company’s database.
Application Solution
A single PLC on the line is used to control all phases of operation. The PLC reads data from an online scale, adjusts the revolution rate on a feed auger to control the amount of product dispensed, adjusts the speed of a filler unit and monitors the vibrator that settles product in the can. When a production run is finished, the PLC sets a Boolean flag indicating that the data is ready. The PC running the InduSoft interface detects the flag, picks up the production data and publishes it as a report to the database.
Since Mother Parkers had InduSoft installed, the most significant benefit is that staff can associate data with a specific production run so that it’s possible to tell precisely what costs are associated with a particular blend. It’s possible to hone in and see how much coffee is being given away inadvertently and get closer to target weights.
This is an InduSoft customer success story.
Tri-Phase Automation is an InduSoft distributor in Wisconsin
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