Representative End User Clients
Representative Automation Clients
Representative Software Clients
Client: Established in 1820 in Durban, South Africa, Premier FMCG has grown from being a local bakery to one of the largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) suppliers in the country. The company has, over the years, diversified its market presence to include a number of distinct segments such as food, confectionary, beverage, household, and homecare to its balanced business portfolio. It currently owns and operates 16 bakeries, five wheat mills, two maize mills, one sugar confectionery plant, and 24 distribution depots spread across Africa and Europe. Its wheat mills have an annual wheat processing capacity of about 800,000 tons.
Requirement: Part of Premier’s efforts to replace the aging control, automation, and electrical systems in its wheat mills with cost-effective, energy-efficient, and future-ready solutions, the company sought to modernize and standardize the plant control systems and software while installing power metering and variable speed drives to improve energy management. After conducting a rigorous nationwide search and considering several other brand names and products, Premier chose Schneider Electric’s next-generation control system – PlantStruxure PES – for its plant modernization project.
Solution: PlantStruxure PES – one of the most innovative process automation systems available on the market – optimizes plant performance and increases operator, engineering, and maintenance efficiency while offering integrated energy management solutions to improve the overall operational effectiveness of the business. Built on Schneider Electric’s range of Ethernet-based architecture, PlantStruxure PES offers a single software environment to efficiently engineer and operate process and energy usage and consists of redundant supervision servers and clients connected to multiple controllers, remote I/O stations, and hundreds of variable speed drives.
Implementation: A dedicated team was formed to support the design and integration of the electrical, control, and automation systems. The team carried out a complete system reengineering through PES’ object-oriented architecture using newly structured codes. Shift from old systems to the new systems done with the help of a multifaceted approach ensured reduced downtime during plant shutdown/maintenance.
Interoperability within the configured architecture enabled PES to collect the process, quality, and energy data from the plant and generate detailed reports assessing the amount of wheat and floor processed and energy consumed by each section of the plant. These flexible reports in turn helped the Premier plant management team conduct an in-depth analysis of the mill performance over any period of time desired (i.e., hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc.).
A supervision system was used to track the flow of wheat and flour through each of the plant process. This system was integrated into Premier’s intranet, with remote access and control functionality available to limited users on the intranet from any of their sites within the country. This all-in-one configuration of the PlantStruxure PES provided Premier with a mechanism to monitor its mill operations real time while ensuring seamless connectivity between the production and business systems.
Benefits Realized: Schneider Electric’s flexible and scalable solution PlantStruxure PES delivered the following benefits to Premier: effective performance reporting, advanced operation services, improved energy management, cost-effective engineering, and reduced downtime, utility costs, and carbon emission through predictive maintenance. Also, as an industrial control, supervision, and reporting solution, PlantStruxure PES provided Premier a single environment for engineering, operation, and maintenance activities of its wheat mills. Premier reaped another benefit in the long-term system backup and efficient process and energy management features offered by the Schneider Electric solution. Its flexible and scalable architecture ensure Premier easy expansion and modification of its systems in the future.
Keywords: Schneider Electric, PlantStruxure PES, Process Automation Systems, ARC Advisory Group.