South Caernarfon Creameries is a leading dairy manufacturer based in Snowdonia, North West Wales.  Manufacturing over 7,500 tonnes of cheese annually, it drives the local economy by sourcing in excess of 80 million litres of milk annually from local  farmers.

Due largely to their aging legacy equipment, they were facing increased maintenance costs, and were unable to cope with changing demand for new product varieties, track and trace legislation, and improved quality control. They also had a problem due to demand variation caused by seasonal peaks, retailer promotions, increasing nutritional education, packaging variations and changing export regulations.

The creamery had a large array of legacy equipment acquired over the years that presented some fundamental limitations in production, with vat cheese controllers restricted to a set number of recipes. This meant that any variations had to be manually managed, giving rise to possible inconsistencies and errors in recipe batch production.

The combination of outdated and inflexible systems and increasingly obsolete and expensive parts, was resulting in crippling maintenance costs for the group.   In combating spiralling maintenance costs, eliminating the risk of expensive equipment failures and being proactive to variances in production demand, the group had no choice but to modernise their systems in ensuring their ongoing effectiveness and any future expansion.

Magelis HMI

After a detailed review process, South Caernarfon Creameries selected Schneider Electric and local system integrator to review their manufacturing automation.  The solution comprised of a PlantStruxureTM architecture consisting of a central Modicon M340 PAC controller for each of the six cheese vats, a Modicon STB distributed I/O island, each with local Magelis HMI STO colour touch-screen operator interface unit connected to a site-wide Industrial Ethernet network.

A 10” Magelis XBTGT5230 colour touch-screen HMI operator panel, holds the new recipe management system, and the system provides a centralised recipe manager, with any recipe easily downloaded to any vat on demand. Product consistency is also maximised through the modular nature of the system and repeatable recipe batch functionality.

Since the new system was commissioned in 2012, South Caernarfon Creameries have expanded their recipe range to twenty four, compared to the previous limit of four, and allowed more product lines to be introduced.

Reducing changeover times

Recipe edit times have been reduced from 40 minutes under to old control system to under three minutes with the new PlantStruxure system, providing a significant reduction in costly downtime and vastly improving production efficiency. The plant is now more responsive to production requirements and new recipes, ensuring minimal downtime and impact to their production effectiveness.

You Tube video of Schneider Automation at South Caernarfon Creameries

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