Category: Case Studies

Chemical Manufacturer Upgrades Critical Systems

A midwestern US chemical plant plays an integral part of the worldwide supply of stock for animal feed, refined human vegetable oils, and various other products. This family-owned operation has been a powerhouse in soybean processing, specifically, for more than half a century. As such, their processing areas for that product specifically are considered the Full Story

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Case Study: Methodical Approach to a Systems Upgrade

  ECS Solutions, Inc. (ECS) recently helped a client with an upgrade by leveraging ECS’ methodical approach to system solutions.  Their client has three very similar processing areas known as casting pits.  Each was controlled by an independent GE 9030 PLC system, each with a main, and each controlled by a local BLUE Open Studio Full Story

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Case Study: Brewhouse Automation and Functional Upgrade

  ECS Solutions was contracted to replace a control system that was becoming obsolete at a brewery in Florida. The Venezuelan-based parent company, for which ECS Solutions employees had already completed multiple projects,  was concerned that the automation hardware could go bad and be difficult to replace, leading to a shutdown of the plant. The Full Story

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Case Study: Integrating PlantPAx into an Existing Process Cell for a Pharmaceutical Company

A major pharmaceutical company was in the process of commissioning a control system for a new process cell and asked ECS to provide site support to complete the commissioning and qualification. The control system supplier had taken a simplistic approach to keep costs down. A single controller with multiple Panelviews provided the heart of the Full Story

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Case Study: An Expansion of a Water Treatment Plant

A municipal utility asked ECS Solutions to design and construct an expansion to one of their Water Treatment Plants.  It was proposed to expand an existing facility from ten million gallons per day (MGD) to a total treatment capacity of 30 MGD and upon completion of the expansion, an existing 18 MGD plant was to Full Story

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Case Study: FactoryTalk Batch Integration into a Control System for a Pharmaceutical Company

A large pharmaceutical company was commissioning and testing a new control system that was limited to providing only manual control of Equipment Modules.  In some cases, manual control of Phases was available, with these Phases operating as coordination Equipment Modules but not having the infrastructure capable of interacting with a standard sequencing engine.  To run Full Story

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Case Study: Process Lines to WIP Bins

The plant of a large, packaged food manufacturer contains multiple processing lines and a series of transfer lines to move the finished products into storage bins.  Presently there are six process lines in operation but only four transfer lines, which limits the transfer from processing to storage.  For example, if all four processing lines are Full Story

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Case Study: Taking the Bottleneck out of the Packaging Line

With continually increasing demand, a large, packaged food manufacturer sought to increase the capacity on their 15 packaging lines. Already producing 24/7, the packaging lines were restricted at the back end with palletizing and stretch wrapping. The existing configuration in the plant had four stretch wrappers and four palletizers being shared by the packaging lines Full Story

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Case Study: Ignition at Large Food Manufacturer

A large food manufacturer requested assistance from ECS Solutions in replacing a SCADA/HMI system that was unreliable and difficult to maintain. After consultation with us, they selected the Ignition platform from Inductive Automation.  Ignition provides a reliable platform that can be supported and developed internally or by system integrators. Ignition would provide the power to Full Story

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Case Study: Proprietary Replacement

For many years, a large nutrition company used a Proprietary program that was developed in-house, to manage the recipe database and to calculate the mass balances of the ingredients to meet the nutritional profile of each product. The application/program has become difficult to support and maintain. The customer approached ECS Solutions to undertake a review Full Story

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