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Client Profile: Since 1990, Newlands Systems has established itself as a brewing equipment manufacturer. It is located in Abbotsford, Canada and is led by Brad McQuhae, who has more than 25 years' experience in the brewing industry. Newlands designs breweries from the brew master's perspective. Newlands consists of a long history with every brew system and has the brewing experience, engineering and technical background, and skilled craftsmanship to build custom stainless steel breweries. From brewery design, to custom fabrication, to onsite installation and training, Newlands delivers the entire process. Newlands' manufacturing facilities are ASME certified and utilizes ISO 9001:2008 quality management system, along with proven project management systems, to ensure high quality breweries.
Business Need: Craft brewing became a big thing all across North America in the late 1980s and has grown rapidly since then. The high demand by customers for unique and customized products led the industry to produce unique merchandises in varied microbreweries, brew pubs, and regional brew houses. Newlands Systems, as an equipment supplier has been designing breweries from this perspective. Newlands Systems provides process solutions that extend from conceptual design and feasibility to configuration, fabrication, installation, brew quality audits, and after sales support. Thus, the company has had the opportunity of serving loyal customers over a period of time. The customers would often look to replicate what worked in other places to widen the scope of distribution. For instance, if a craft brewer decided to expand the production facilities in other geographic regions, then for each installation, Newlands would have to consider unique recipe ingredients and processing requirements, along with facility limitations, climate, energy, and water constraints, etc. In order to meet these various needs, Newlands wanted to incorporate a standard process control system. The company was convinced that this would create a balanced approach to customization and enhance repeatability, supply chain efficiency, and time-to-market. In short, the company was looking to streamline the system development and speed up time-to-market on highly customized craft brewing systems.
Solution Implementation: Rockwell Automation provided the company with an array of solutions. It included products such as Rockwell Automation PlantPAx® distributed control system (DCS). This was configured using standard control objects. The application ran on an Allen-Bradley® CompactLogix™ controller and combined the Allen-Bradley® PowerFlex® AC drives for speed control and local monitoring with visualization capabilities. All through this implementation, the company used Rockwell Automation Global OEM Technical Consultants (GOTCs) working onsite at Newlands headquarters as well as local distributors and the account team. Deployed on an EtherNet/IP™ network, the system included an Allen-Bradley Stratix™ managed Ethernet and wireless access point solution for smart plant operation. The craft brewing application by Rockwell provided a flexible and modular control along with a platform that worked well for Newlands' broad system portfolio with its varied vessel size, complexity, and levels of instrumentation and automation.
Benefits: The solution provided by Rockwell Automation reduced the system complexity for Newlands Systems. It also saved time taken in development and made remote monitoring capability of installed solutions a possibility with Ethernet connectivity.
Source Case Study
Keywords: Rockwell Automation, Brewery, Newlands Systems, Distributed Control System, ARC Advisory Group