Tri Tech’s PLC Fix for Bagging Plant Pays For Itself in Less Than a Month, Increases Factory Production 30%

The Situation

Imagine that you have a factory that automatically creates, fills, and packages a product that’s in high demand from your customers. Each part of that process involves a series of steps on the assembly line, each timed down to the millisecond to ensure that every action is accomplished in precise harmony with the others. There is no room for error: even the slightest miscalculation will throw the entire sequence off, resulting in disaster and missed profits – to the tune of thousands of lost dollars per hour. Your factory is already invested to the hilt with multiple pieces of expensive machinery to get the job done; if the sequencing starts to fail, replacing each piece of equipment simply isn’t an option.

Sometimes things break down all at once with a major event. But other times, the degradation happens slowly over time, so that it is barely noticeable until one day, your production rate has dropped from 26 bags per hour to just 20. With high-cost equipment to manage and keep running, a slower processor can often take a back seat to more pressing issues. But at some point, it will need to be addressed – otherwise you’re not only losing profits, you’re missing out on greater potential revenue if you move things along even a little bit faster. But how to figure out what is causing the problem, let alone fix it?

The Customer’s Need

That’s exactly what happened with Tri Tech’s customer. Not only were things slowing on the assembly line, but pieces in the sequence were starting to crash, compounding in time over the process and causing painful down time. The timers were programmed to a given time set point in milliseconds, and they were seeing up to a 40-50 millisecond lag from scan to scan. The processor in this case was older and not equipped to handle the newer firmware, and the customer was losing confidence in the control system to do its job. They weren’t even sure if the problem was due to a mechanical or electrical issue. They were considering every option, even up to replacing the entire machine – a huge capital output that would require additional downtime for the installation and reconfiguring. The cost in lost revenue of that downtime would be even more than cost of the physical equipment and labor, but they were out of ideas. They were oversold as it was, and needed to at least get back to previous performance levels.

This customer had already sought answers from at least three other automation experts, none of whom were able to come up with a solution. They had all but given up on how to figure out what was causing the problem, let alone fix it – until they happened to get a friendly check-in call from Tri Tech Automation.

The Tri Tech Solution

Luckily, the factory in question already had a relationship with Tri Tech Automation. Tri Tech had managed a few small projects with them in the past, and when we called to check up on the customer, asked the same question we ask all our customers: What’s going well, and what’s not going well? “It’s something we do on every call,” said James Maisel, Managing Member & Visionary. “We’ve found that when you ask a contact how things are going, they don’t say too much. But if you ask them what’s going wrong, they usually have plenty to share. It’s not always something that Tri Tech can fix, but if there’s even a chance, we’re going to work with them to figure out how we can help.”

Tri Tech sprang into action. We asked questions, collected as much data from the customer as possible, and came up with some theories on what might be going on and why. We determined that it might an issue with the processor, but wanted to walk the site firsthand to be sure. Tri Tech was able to quickly schedule a visit to the customer site, do preliminary evaluations to test out our theories of what we suspected to be the root problem, and then start crafting a customized solution. As Maisel explained, “We walked the line with the customer to assess the challenges and asked for the PLC program. We observed that the processor was really strained for the application and made the postulate that the system was degraded due to scan time issues. We suggested doing a phased approach where we replace the PLC and get a faster processor.” Tri Tech came up with a game plan, got it approved, and got to work. The plan included:

Replacing the processor with a small rack and an L8, which allowed for reduced risk as they left all the existing I/O in place.
Creation of remote racks.
Bringing the new processor online.
Installation of the new hardware – and once the new controller was in, we were able to fix the specific settings that were causing the delays in the sequencing.

Then Tri Tech went above and beyond the call of duty: with our big-picture perspective as well as our attention to detail, we were able to spot and address additional issues that were outside the original scope of work, all while adhering to the original budgets.

The Results

Not only did Tri Tech get a new processor up and running so the customer’s equipment could work properly again, we were even able to improve the speed of each step in the automation sequencing process so the machine could run through its entire cycle more quickly. The final numbers speak for themselves:

Machine output from the line increased by over 30%, with less down time and no need for replacing expensive equipment.
This yielded the customer an additional $1 million in the first month of production – all for a fix of about $50K fix, a 20-fold ROI in just 30 days.
What’s more, the additional insights Tri Tech brought to the customer’s attention about another process in the plant during our site visits also resulted in increased throughput and efficiency.

The bottom line: Tri Tech’s fix paid for itself in less than a month, bringing the customer’s machine from unusable to outperforming beyond their expectations.

Tri Tech’s experience with this customer opened up a whole new conversation about the value of implementing smaller fixes on a quarterly basis that aren’t large capital investments, but result in incremental improvements that all compound to significant ROI. The customer also owns more of these same machines in plants across the country, and realized they may have this same challenge with those. Instead of waiting for those machines to hit a breaking point, they’re planning to get ahead of the same potential issues with Tri Tech’s proactive help. Tri Tech earned the customer’s trust, and has quickly become their go-to resource for any and all solution needs.