PLC upgrade increases uptime, speed and line responsiveness

摘要

Bakkavor's Holbeach St. Marks pizza production facility features a large fully automated manufacturing line that extends over two floors, to turn raw materials into finished products. The basic process mixes mainly flour and water to make pizza dough which then continues to be rolled, stretched, heat treated and proved. Once the dough is ready, round pizza bases are produced. Each single process builds on the steps before it, so any issue upstream in the sequence may influence the end result and is also difficult to correct downstream. In such a highly synchronised system, effective inter-process control is crucial. When a project was started to make improvements to the system, the existing control system on the dough rolling section was over 20 years old. Simply as a result of its age and relative obsolescence issues had become ever harder to fix and so production was not running at optimum efficiency.