Bulla Dairy Foods
Wednesday 6th of August 2004
After just 3 months fit out and commissioning, Bulla Dairy Foods in
Colac two hours west of Melbourne , began its first production runs.
With a reputation as one of the premier manufacturers of liquid dairy
product in Australia , the company has now also built an enviable international
reputation. Bulla Dairy Foods export to over a dozen countries worldwide.
“We have been able to develop these opportunities quickly because
we present a quality product. Our clients trust our production methods
and depend on our reliability”
“Siemens Australia and their partners played a vital role in
having us ready to go in April last year. Their ongoing commitment to
our plant gives us the confidence we need to ensure our position in these
competitive markets”.
Andrew Legg, Bulla’s Maintenance Co-Coordinator recalls. “I’ve
worked all over the world in the food and beverage industry and I’ve
used a number of automation vendors, however when asked for my input
in selecting a supplier of an automation solution, I could not go past
my experiences with the Siemens product and support”
As a part of the Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) strategy, Siemens
and it’s partners were able to engineer the Bulla plant from ground
up and have it operational in time for April’s first production
run.
The Siemens approach to automation breaks traditional grounds. Simatic
TIA is a tightly integrated software and hardware solution covering project
management, programming, total network communications, configuration
management and much much more.
The Siemens solution at Bulla Dairy Foods is a classical example of
Simatic TIA
The Colac plant incorporates multiple Siemens S7-200 PLCs, in excess
of twenty S7-300 PLCs and one S7-400 PLC with over 7000 I/O points. In
addition numerous Siemens HMI panels are installed throughout the plant
at machine level.
Finally the TIA approach was made complete by implementing an extensive
Profibus communications network. Field hardware covering many technologies
and numerous vendors are linked into the overall Siemens Automation System
enabling complete plant control and monitoring at SCADA level by Siemens
WinCC.
Because of it’s open architecture based on industry standards
the TIA approach permits easy integration of other vendors equipment,
thus saving engineering and commissioning time.
Andrew Legg adds,
“In the context of my experiences, the strength Siemens has always
had, lies within its software. Take fault finding for example. Step 7
is extremely flexible in the options it offers within its PLC programming
environment. We use the S7 Graph feature, as a form of fault finding
by monitoring a number of sequencers across any section of our plant,
we track data feed back and evaluate the information as it appears in
graph format. We can then target any anomalies in the process”.
“Further to that, the Siemens HMI panels we have on site, allow
us to import ISO drawings of machine components making identification
of problems at component level fast and very easy. We can also import
our hardware manuals in the same way”.
“We have been completely satisfied with the Siemens outcome.
Together with their partners they have provided the complete solution
from ground up and their support has been fabulous from day one”
“We have a number of plans in place with regards to combining
our ERP software with Siemens WinCC. These will mature in the next couple
of years. We have no doubt Siemens will again play a vital role in our
plans”
The Siemens TIA approach at Bulla Dairy Foods in country Victoria represents
a complete technology architecture. It has allowed object-orientated
software to run the entire family of Automation Systems.
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