Page 26 - Packaging News Nov-Dec 2019

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BEVERAGE PACKAGING
AUTOMATION www.packagingnews.com.au
A 25-year journey to automation
Some 25 years ago, Coopers Brewery in Adelaide commenced a journey from mechanisation to automation – which has resulted in outstanding productivity improvements. Hartley Henderson writes.
November-December 2019
OUNDED in 1862 by Thomas Cooper, the company is the largest family-owned brewery in Australia. It is an unlisted company with more than 170 shareholders, most of whom are related by descent or mar-
riage to Thomas Cooper.
With a total workforce of 230,
including interstate and overseas employees, Coopers currently repre- sents about five per cent of Australia’s total beer market and sells around 80 million litres of beer a year.
In 2001, the company built a new brewery on a 10 hectare site in the Adelaide suburb of Regency Park at a cost of $40 million; more than $150 million has since been spent on in- creasing capacity and warehousing.
In 2017, Coopers opened a $65 mil- lion malting plant at its Regency Park site with a capacity of 54,000 tonnes per year, of which the
company uses about a third. The rest is sold nationally and overseas.
Coopers operations manager, Nick Sterenberg, says the automa- tion journey over 25 years has delivered substantial productivity improvement of around 800 per- cent in relation to the number of cartons produced per operator. “We started with just two PLCs and that has grown to 70 PLCs which automate various parts of the plant,” he told PKN at a recent in- terview in Adelaide.
“Manufacturing processes now are generally going to smaller batch sizes and this means more change- overs, increasing complexity, and the need for more pieces of informa- tion. With the introduction of advanced monitoring and analytical technology, things that were previ- ously done in the laboratory are now done on the line in real-time.”
Sterenberg compares the Coopers facility to a big machine, which is con- trolled by PLCs via a SCADA system.
“In relation to packaging, each production run is a work order that starts and stops down on the line, and all operational information is collected directly from monitoring devices on the line.
“This information shows the effi- ciency of the line, including how fast the bottles run and any wastage, such as bottles falling over. The data shows you any issues with the line, enables quick remedial action, and reduces downtime,” he says.
Another key benefit of automa- tion, says Sterenberg, is that it has enabled traceability of all products from the farm gate to the bottle shop.
“We have an in-house automation team that works closely with Sie- mens, which supplies most of our automation technology. This part- nership follows the steps necessary to introduce effective automation systems for the company including identifying areas for improved pro- ductivity, creation of a Functional Design Specification (FDS), and establishing user requirements.
“Once deliverables have been identified, an Australian Standard Contract is prepared and Siemens is provided with an order to deliver to specifications. Siemens then builds a test system and delivers it to us so any bugs can be ironed out before be- coming fully operational,” he says.
AUTOMATION PHASES
Leonie Wong, business development manager at Siemens, says the Coopers brewhouse was commissioned in the late 1990s with Siemens controllers, and it became the standard automa- tion platform as the plant grew.
Humans just can’t do some aspects of automation, and we have gone from systems as good as a person to systems better than a person.”
– Nick Sterenberg, Coopers