News | Page 9 | ECS Solutions

Large Consumer Goods Case Study

THE CHALLENGE

ECS was hired to upgrade and replace a CIP control system in one of the manufacturing areas for a large consumer goods company. The scope of work included a new control enclosure containing an upgrade from a SLC5 controller to a ControlLogix controller. The upgrade also consisted of all IO and connections within the enclosure. Additionally, the company wanted to solve the problem of inefficiencies in its CIP process by implementing FactoryTalk Batch and Batch control within this updated CIP system.

(more…)

The Benefits of Off-The-Shelf SOP Management Software

Being able to keep track of every step and every bit of data is a major necessity for every organization. An off-the-shelf standard operating procedure software is one way to implement new processes and keep track of business operating standards.

Tracking manual operations in discrete, batch, and continuous manufacturing processes can greatly benefit from off-the-shelf products. Clearly specifying your procedures, enforcing their execution, and capturing pertinent data are all major benefits that can be quickly and easily be obtained by implementing off-the-shelf, procedure management software.

(more…)

Flexible and Modular CIP and SIP Automation Enables Continuous Improvements

Clean In Place (CIP) and Steam in Place (SIP) constitute critical aspects of the bottom line of a manufacturing process, just as important as the products manufactured with the assets, CIP and SIP play a very important role in the product quality as well as the overall availability of the equipment to manufacture these products. Being able to consistently execute the required cleaning step regardless of the equipment level of automation is paramount, and being able to clearly specify and enforce the steps required are critical regardless of how these tasks are executed. Operators and equipment should seamlessly perform their task to ensure the desired cleaning procedures are executed in an optimum manner.

(more…)

Bardstown Bourbon Company Case Study

The Challenge

Bardstown Bourbon Company (BBC) is a Bourbon Distillery located in Bardstown Kentucky. Utilizing two mash cookers, 32 fermenters, two distillation stills, and nine cistern holding tanks, BBC produces a wide variety of high-quality whiskeys and bourbons. (more…)

Securing your Intellectual Property

Production procedures and formula values property

How secure is the intellectual property of your products?

Many degrees of automation exist in manufacturing plants, but they all have a common requirement– specifying the activities and the order in which they need to occur as well as the key setpoints such as materials, amounts, tolerances, temperatures, durations, etc.

(more…)

The Importance of Material Tracing

Traceability on a processing or production line is incredibly important, especially when it comes to food products, where having the ability to track every ingredient down to the source is crucial to the health and safety of the consumers.

As parts of the country begin to move out of COVID-19 shutdowns, we have been hearing about “contact tracing” as a tool for containing a secondary spread of the disease. Material, lot tracing, or traceability has been part of producing safe food products for a long time. The concepts behind contact tracing and material tracing are similar.

(more…)

Improve Cooking Quality Utilizing the Lethality Factor Principles

Cooking (thermal processing) is critically important for controlling the levels of foodborne pathogens in products. Cooking is an effective process for eliminating, or at least reducing to acceptable levels, any pathogenic bacteria that may be present in the products. Today thermal processing is applied to literally hundreds of types of manufacturing processes from hams to jerky and many other industries.

There is a wide variety of processes, schedules, and equipment used in cooking areas. Furthermore, the products have unique compositions, e.g., fat and moisture content, ingredients, and other characteristics that can create different responses to the thermal processing technology used. It becomes important to appreciate how different processing systems and schedules affect product lethality, i.e., the capacity to cause death or serious harm to the non-desirable.

(more…)

Materials and Lot ID Traceability

In the event of a recall can you find everything you need to know in an expeditious way.

As per Wikipedia, “Traceability” is the capability to trace something. In some cases, it is interpreted as the ability to verify the history, location, or application of an item by means of documented recorded identification.

In the process industry, we are required to know the whereabouts of the raw and intermediate materials as well as the finished products. This is paramount since recalls can be impactful to the safety of the consumer as well as financially to the producers.

(more…)

Automated Procedures for Manual Processes

Process customers do not need to automate their equipment to start taking advantage of some of the important benefits that off-the-shelf automation products possess. Processes that are typically operated manually can benefit from automating their procedural execution, meaning that the activities that operator typically perform by following printed Standard Operating Procedures can be Specified, Enforced, and Verified in electronic form.

Off-the-shelf products allow us to Specify recipes that can span multiple unit procedures. These can be enforced by prompting the operator or operators of the different areas to perform the required manual activities in the order specified, information normally captured on a sheet of paper or batch log can be annotated and journaled electronically and then this information can be instantly used to make decisions on the active recipe (i.e. adjust the amount of material to be added based on a sample analysis).

(more…)

Weighing In Dispensing System

Manual weighing and dispensing tracked electronically.

Automating the dosing of Minor and Micro ingredients is often cost-prohibitive. These tasks are often performed manually by operators that weigh the required materials then dose them to the required destination at the appropriate time. These procedures are typically guided by Paper Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) that are used to track progress and capture required information manually.

These activities can be conducive to errors that are captured downstream after additional value has been added to the raw materials, some of these errors cause batches to be reprocessed or rejected.

(more…)