Page 15 - Food & Drink Magazine Nov-Dec 2018

MAIN: Foodmach’s LMES enables machines on a packaging line to talk to each other.
BELOW & BOTTOM: DuluxGroup’s fully-automated filling and production lines at the new Greenfield factory site in Melbourne.
✷ DATA DECODED
COVER STORY
investing in IIoT capability. It’s a great arrangement where Foodmach benefits from working with some of the pioneers in the Industry 4.0 space and witnesses the great outcomes these customers enjoy. And it means that we have the experience behind us to know what works.
We’ve developed a large team of expert programmers breaking new ground in this field, which enables us to integrate entire production lines and bring our customers closer to Industry 4.0.
A PRIME EXAMPLE
In one example, DuluxGroup required end-to-end automation at its new Greenfield site in Melbourne - the latest in world-class paint-making technology. Located in Merrifield Business
Park in Melbourne’s north,
the $165 million manufacturing facility is the largest coatings factory in Australia and
New Zealand.
The new factory has five fully-automated filling and production lines: three high-velocity and a blend and tint plant with two smaller lines. It has a total capacity of 50m-70m litres (spring capacity) per year.
150+ raw materials that are handled without manual intervention and 150 recipes can change if needed. The filling lines can handle about 1200 SKUs.
Foodmach supplied all the depalletising, conveying systems, robotic orientation, AGV and laser coding/labelling systems, integrating its equipment with equipment purchased from international
OEMs, and provided an over-arching line control system able to handle all the challenges of batch paint production, now and into the future.
The Merrifield project took many years of collaboration - they first contacted us in August 2011. Today DuluxGroup's project director Kevin Worrell describes the plant as one of the top five Industry 4.0 batch plants in the world at the moment. ✷
✷ ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TECH IN FOCUS
Foodmach’s Line Management Execution System (LMES) is a user-focused interface that uses high-level control architecture design (OMAC) and PackML (packaging machinery language) to get all the machines on a packaging line talking to each other.
It enables operators to obtain consistent data from different machine brands with different control systems, maximise performance, isolate issues and make changes without calling in a software engineer.
OMAC stands for the 'Organisation for Machine Automation and Control', and its mission is to "advance manufacturing capabilities and efficiencies through identifying common problems, standardisation, and improvements to processes that positively impact the way companies do business".
OMAC helps manufacturers work together to find successful new and innovative ways with their production operations. Open modular architecture controls are effectively a design philosophy for describing equipment and procedures.
PackML, which is actually more of a methodology than a language, is an industry standard for the control of packaging machines. It enables a common 'look and feel' and operational consistency to all machines that make up a packaging line.
PackML provides standard defined machine states and operational flow; Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Data; Root Cause Analysis (RCA) data; and Flexible Recipe schemes and common SCADA / MES inputs. ✷
Earle Roberts is the chief customer officer for Foodmach,
specialists in automation,
robotics, integration and
turn key projects. Contact Earle at sales@ foodmach.com.au
www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au | November-December 2018 | Food&Drink business | 15