
Major SCADA and PLC Upgrade Increases Uptime and Lowers Maintenance Costs for Rice Milling Company
A rice milling company needed a new PLC in a truncated timeline. Automation Group, an E Tech Group company project team inventoried equipment and upgraded the facility to Ignition SCADA software setting the client up to meet short-term goals and be prepared for long-term growth.
Our recent addition, Automation Group, an E Tech Group Company, completed this case study. A summarized version is below. Click here to read the full case study on their site.
Problem:
A rice milling company needed a new PLC program to be installed within a 48-hour timeframe to minimize production impacts, and the existing SCADA system needed to remain operational during the migration to Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform. Automation Group, an E Tech Group Company was engaged as the customer’s choice system integrator given their advanced expertise in system migration and the successful execution of projects at the customer’s other facilities.
Solution:
The project team created a site inventory of the customer’s existing PLCs, network, computers, and applications. The project included upgrades to servers, computers, and network switches in collaboration with the customer’s IT department, the upgrade to Ignition SCADA software across six applications with approximately 500 screens, and the upgrade to two ControlLogix PLC chassis.
Results:
The SCADA upgrade was completed in several phases and each application was upgraded individually. This helped minimize impacts on the customer’s production efforts and enabled the legacy and new SCADA applications to run simultaneously so the customer’s personnel could learn the new SCADA software. Automation Group, an E Tech Group company leverages this diverse, multidisciplinary engineering approach to create intelligent automation solutions for the customer’s long-term success and the opportunity to support their operations in the years to come.