Challenge

Co-packing allows consumer packaged goods manufacturers faster turnaround times, greater flexibility, and often significant cost savings over doing it themselves. Successful co-packing relationships are based on good communication and the ability to measure, benchmark, and validate performance. When the largest independent beverage co-packer was facing data acquisition challenges from their manual performance monitoring system, the company needed to find an automated solution that could monitor real-time operations across its manufacturing sites.

Solution

The customer had been shopping around for this project. Others had quoted new “out of the box” options that included additional sensors & equipment, extended implementation times, and very lofty price tags.  After building confidence and rapport through our Emergency Service Support visits, E Tech Group was asked to submit a proposal to deploy a robust data acquisition strategy that delivered an automated real-time performance monitoring system.

The customer was already using the Ignition industrial application platform from Inductive Automation. Ignition is developer-friendly and designed to be maintained at the customer level. The customer owns the data, and it is exportable in multiple formats. There are no subscription fees, so the ongoing maintenance costs are very low. Instead of adding another system like others had proposed, the E Tech Group team innovated the solution to expand on Ignition’s unlimited and fully customizable system that could efficiently provide real-time data to monitor performance.

Results

E Tech Group’s Senior Controls Engineer certified in Ignition designed an automated downtime performance monitoring and reporting system that would give the beverage co-packer visibility to metrics across multiple locations. Aiming to utilize existing sensors to save on hardware costs, several programmable logic controllers would need reprogramming. Remote development enabled E Tech Group to accomplish this without site visits, increasing their efficiency and the implementation time. Effectively employing this agile system resulted in significant cost savings for the beverage co-packer and provided the necessary tools to take their business to the next level.