Dickinson wins second Pace Zenith Award

3 July 2009 Dickinson wins second Pace Zenith Award in 2009, this time in the food and beverage category due to an inovative system replacement for Weston Millings Enfield plant which is their largest in Australia.

Weston Milling is a leading Australian food product manufacturer and is a business unit of Weston Cereal Industries which in turn is a division of George Weston Foods (GWF).  The Enfield site is currently undergoing an automation systems redevelopment program that will modernize the control system, removing existing legacy system risk and improving information management within the production environment.

The site’s existing control system (> 3000 I/O) had become difficult to maintain considering the limited number of PLC spares available including racks, power supplies, processors, I/O and communications cards – not to mention the HP Monitrol SCADA system which was a single point of failure for the entire wheat receival, milling and flour distribution operations.

With the range of controllers that facilitated the milling process, there were also varied networks and protocols that existed in the legacy system. Dickinson’s experience with similar projects allowed decisions that streamlined the engineering required for all stages of the project. The final controller layout also provided for the swapout of legacy bus networks as required down the track.

One of the key features of the design of the control system was the building of individual process sequences into distinct process control ‘phases’. Each control phase defines a sequence and a set of input and output parameters. These provide the building blocks for the complete manufacturing and material management process. This design allows a high degree of flexibility and customisation of each process, as the sequencing of the control phases is done within the jobbing system rather than being completely embedded in PLC logic.

The final system will have minimized production interference and risk involved with the upgrade process through comprehensive design, FAT and flexible implementation processes. The customer has also been left with a vastly improved information management and distributed reporting system, removing the requirement for several of their existing cumbersome paper based historical production logs.