W & H Marriage and Sons, UK - Flour mill

W & H Marriage and Sons is a well renowned independent family business established in 1824 which has undergone many modifications and upgrades over the years. The most recent being the replacement of the flour mill's SCADA based PLC control system with DSL Systems fully automated, purpose built AutoPilot4Flour advanced control system.

AutoPilot4Flour offered enormous benefits over the old traditional SCADA system. The old SCADA system was non-integrated, partly manually controlled and offered minimal reporting capability. Traceability was non-existent and support and modifications were difficult, expensive and potentially risky.

DSL Systems proposed AutoPilot4Flour, a complete solution that was fully integrated, fully automatic and that covered all areas of the flour mill operation. This includes wheat intake, blending, transfer and conditioning to flour transfer and the control of a traditional stone plant and all roller mill processes.

W & H Marriage and Sons were looking for a system that was robust and reliable, modern but simple in design, accurate, fast and user friendly in operation. It needed to have powerful data logging, auditing and reporting, a system that was flexible for future enhancements, with 24 hour support and more importantly a proven company that had the resources and ability to pull it off in a critical time schedule. And that's exactly what the professional team at DSL Systems delivered.

DSL's AutoPilot4Feed design is simple. It centres around one or more standard PCs running Windows XP operating system, in real time mode. One or more PLCs (programmable logic controllers) provide the interface to the plant. In W & H Marriage and Sons case, DSL Systems, provided a control PC, an identical standby PC and seven live remote PCs conveniently located throughout the areas of the mill and administration offices. The number and location of networked PCs in the future is unlimited. Several PCs were installed with multiple flat screen monitors enabling the operator to view the whole mill at a glance. The design of AutoPilot4Feed includes built-in redundancy as the standby PC can take over the control of the Mill if the control PC ever fails.

DSL Systems began the development phase by designing, in conjunction with the technical members of W & H Marriage and Sons, a thorough control specification covering the operation of all plant items in detail.

Configuration and development then followed. The AutoPilot4Flour software is a standard package configured and scaled as required for each plant. All configuration options are accessible to advanced users (with password access).

With the base configuration completed, the crucial phase of testing and validation was carried out. To coincide with the control system upgrade W & H Marriage and Sons took the opportunity to upgrade the electrical wiring and panels in certain areas of the mill. The installation and changeover was therefore carried out over a number of stages and planned around the normal production schedule.

The first stage being the main roller mill and stone plant systems. Two members of DSL Systems' installation team arrived on site on Saturday morning and proceeded to remove the existing SCADA components. After setting up the new control PC, standby PC and remote PCs and establishing communications to plant items via the PLCs. Input and output testing and commissioning was carried out. By midday Sunday (the next day) the flour mill was up and running again with maximum throughput at an extraction of over 80% i.e. downtime of slightly over 24 hours. The ability to view and control all plant processes laid out over multiple flat screen monitors side-by-side was an immediate advantage for operators. The remaining part of the weekend was used for fine-tuning and training the operators under production conditions.

The operators and management took minimal time to adapt to the Windows based menu system, which provides simple access to all options. All options are password protected on a user-by-user basis. The documentation supplied to operators and managers was also well received and comprehensive consisting of User manual, Technical manual, Configuration manual, input / output list, and electrical drawings. The ability to operate all plant equipment manually from the mimic using AutoPilot4Flour's unique active areas on the colour screens was of considerable importance to the operators. Operator: "Yes, it's really easy it didn't take us long to get a handle on it".

For operators moving around the mill, DSL Systems supplied a wireless Hand Held PDA (pocket PC) providing a method of accessing AutoPilot4Flour standard functions. The Hand Held allows operators or managers to remotely monitor production, acknowledge alarms, view stocks and manually override plant items. The Hand Held is particularly handy for maintenance tasks. The Hand Held terminal is a standard PDA supplied in a durable shockproof casing.

The following installation stages consisting of flour transfer, wheat intake, cleaning and conditioning were carried out with equivalent success. After the initial AutoPilot4Flour installation, support, maintenance and modifications have been easily carried out via remote modem access.

Since AutoPilot4Flour uses Windows, remote support is built in. Simply by connecting a standard modem to a normal telephone line provides the facility for remote support anywhere in the world. DSL Systems have fully trained engineers available 24 hours a day, 364 days a year.

The mill management team are extremely pleased with what AutoPilot4Flour offers. Enjoying benefits of a fully traceable control package with extensive logging and stock control features. All data is archived on the system for over 5 years. Standard reporting systems allows all data to be easily viewed and printed. Reports were customised using Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports is supplied with the system for managers to customise or produce new reports.

And what does the mill manager think of AutoPilot4Flour? "It's really great and makes my job so much easier. The operators have got used to it very quickly. And I can sleep easily at night knowing that the system is fully supportable and future-proof"