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Warehouse Management  Success story


DLoG has the bottle for Robert Wiseman Dairies


With the opening of its latest facilities


in Taunton, Somerset, Robert Wiseman Dairies now processes and distributes more than one in every four litres of fresh milk produced in Britain, every day. Bottling this volume of milk requires highly automated plant and equipment, which in turn requires a sophisticated monitoring system. Here, robust shopfloor PC terminals from DLoG are providing the solution.


R


obert Wiseman Dairies has enjoyed a steady growth in business since it was first established in Scotland in 1947, locating its dairy plants on the


west coast of England following pasture land that is ideally suited to dairy herds. Today, the company employs around 4500 staff. In Taunton, the new Bridgwater site was set up to provide the company with local production coverage for the South of England.


Andy Anderson, a business project manager at Wiseman’s, explains: “While the new site was being constructed we started an in-house Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) project to benchmark the performance of our plant. This originated at our Droitwich site, but the decision was quickly taken to implement an OEE system at Bridgwater as it has the very latest plant available featuring increased levels of automation.”


In January 2009, the company began evaluating the best software provider and by May of that year the choice had been narrowed to two suppliers. OEEsystems’ PerformOEE software was chosen as the preferred solution by the end of June. At the same time the potential hardware solution was being evaluated. “You can put a PC in a water-tight, stainless steel cabinet with a touch screen anywhere when there is plenty of space, but we had other issues that made this solution unsuitable,” said Anderson. “We lacked space at some workstations due to other computers and HMI terminals, and this was further compounded by the need for


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MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS


IT July 2011


operators to access the machines. The compact design of the DLoG terminals allowed us to fit a computer in these confined work centres.”


No review required


Based on previous positive experience at Droitwich, where the company had used DLoG’s MPC-series portable, rugged PC units, DLoG was again selected as the preferred supplier. “We didn’t need to review DLoG, just the model required for the project,” said Anderson. “The DLoG IPC- series we chose fitted the environment and we liked the robust nature of the units. We carried out assessments to ensure suitability and were also impressed by the physical vibration and shock testing carried out by DLoG in Munich, where the units are produced.”


IPC-series terminals provide real-time production data for the packaging area.


environment at Bridgewater is nothing like as harsh, the cast and machined aluminium body provides an IP67 enclosure which would probably operate under water.”


At Robert Wiseman Dairies’ Droitwich site the DLoG units are used in a chilled environment at 3 to 4oC and the staff using them had no prior experience of computers. The mobile MPC units are located on the trolley packers used to load the milk into the customer trolleys and are regularly hosed down with water and some chemical cleaning agents, but the robust touch screen interface and IP 67 enclosure rating means they continue to operate reliably. “It’s why we chose DLoG,” explained Anderson. “Although the


For Robert Wiseman Dairies it was crucial that their OEE system interfaces with the plants’ PLC systems, used to automate the equipment. This advanced level of automation makes the site very efficient. However, it also makes it very difficult to see errors occurring. “You know there is a problem, but you don’t know exactly what it is,” said Anderson.


Highly configurable


Designed to monitor the performance of any production equipment, the OEEsystems software running on the DLoG shopfloor terminals is highly configurable. OEEsystems and DLoG worked together to ensure


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