Executive Summary

Parmalat is a national dairy company with a long and fruitful history in Australia. From their beginnings as Pauls milk factory on the banks of the Brisbane river in the 1930s the operation has gone from strength to strength and is currently part of a global dairy operation providing dairy products all over the world. The comprehensive metering and monitoring package provided by Buildings Evolved is in line with the brands commitment to investing in innovation strategies to facilitate its expansion, to set the benchmark for the dairy industry locally and its increasing role in export markets, into Asia and beyond.

Out Performers Pty Ltd were the contracted agents for which Buildings Evolved were commissioned to deliver insights and visibility as to how resources are being consumed in order to bring efficiencies and consequent savings into their operations. The approach involved the installation of multiple sensors around the facility to better understand consumption in relation to plant and equipment performance and efficiency for their Lidcombe manufacturing plant with the capability to expand to 8 facilities nationwide.

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Technical Overview

• There are 5x network ports across different buildings that will form the basis of each RTU bus loop
• On each loop will be a series of Socomec E43 or ECi3 model electricity meters and pulse/analogue input units (the client prefers to use Socomec as it is ubiquitous throughout the company)
• There are to be 4 temperature probes interfaced to existing 4-20ma inputs on the SCADA network
• 3x Gas vortex meters to be installed, 2x on air compressors outputs, and 1x on the steam supply from the boiler
• 1x Gas flow meter to be installed on the boiler input
• The combination of energy meters with their associated outputs will provide plant efficiency measurements

Reporting Capabilities

• Produce data analysis tools comparing;
  • Compressed air flow rates vs energy consumption
  • Chilled water temperature vs energy consumption
  • Glycol temperature vs energy consumption
  • Steam flow rate vs energy consumption
  • Number bottles produced vs power consumption

• Import additional SCADA datasets outside of the metering scope to include metrics such as number of bottles produced for normalization and analysis
• Provide real-time alerting capabilities should user defined consumption thresholds be breached
• Provide a sophisticated reporting engine with 50 standard reports, with any custom reports being developed outside of this proposal

Installation

• Commission RTU converters
• Test RTU bus loops from software before connection to SCADA
• In conjunction with the electrical contractor, test, calibrate and commission electrical meters and digital/analogue inputs
• Work with SCADA engineer to bring metering into SCADA system
• Each area listed below was commissioned as they were installed;
  • Pikpak
  • Refrigeration
  • Glycol
  • Boiler House
  • Homogenizers and Separators
  • Flow meters and Gas pulse
  • Compile documentation to produce an O&M manual

The Solution

By connecting the new metering points to the existing SCADA system, significant value has been added to the engineering teams on site by providing them with high frequency data.  Less frequent data, typically 15-minute interval data will be sent to the Switch Smart Hub for higher level analysis and reporting requirements. It is here that the data is turned into knowledge, through sophisticated data browsing and analysis tools, along with alerts and alarms, and a large collection of stock reports.