Case Study · Food & Beverage
King's Hawaiian Standardizes Technology Requirements for All Machine Builders
A common network and Integrated Architecture ease integration and data sharing between all machines.
Project Summary
Despite several expansions starting in the 1990s, King's Hawaiian had outgrown its facilities again by 2010. Its California factory and bakery were operating 24/7, consumer demand was spreading across the country, and the company had expanded its product line.
With rising gas prices and other transportation costs weighing on the bakery's budget, King's Hawaiian decided to build a new facility in the Eastern United States, putting its growing family of products on store shelves more quickly and cost-effectively.
Challenge
Create a common infrastructure for machine builders for the first centralized data-collection system on a greenfield site.
King's Hawaiian chose to build a highly automated 125,000-square-foot facility in Oakwood, Ga., and set a goal to be up and running within 10 months. The timeline posed a challenge, especially given the complexity of the project. The entire bread-baking process required a total of 11 specialized machines, each manufactured by a different original equipment manufacturer (OEM), and each with a control and information platform requiring a unique design environment, user interface and vendor support model.
By standardizing on the Integrated Architecture system, our people are now able to go from one process to another within the plant, and use the same software and same knowledge to address any number of issues. The architecture also allows us to collect vast amounts of data – about everything from oven temperatures and bake times to scale weights and maintenance operations – that previously we couldn't manage manually.
Solution & Benefits
The BCI team took the lead on creating a standardized plant architecture that would facilitate enterprise-wide visualization and MES implementation. Because so many OEM suppliers were involved, BCI started with a specification that gave every OEM both hardware selection and program development standards, simplifying the enterprise connectivity goals King's Hawaiian was targeting.
The new facility opened one week earlier than planned. It immediately doubled the company's bread production.
Results
180,000
Additional pounds of bread per day
2x
Bread production
1 wk
Ahead of schedule
11
OEM machines standardized
The Integrated Architecture System
- Scalable control across all machines in the facility with Rockwell's Logix control platform
- An EtherNet/IP network providing a real-time communications structure and a single design environment with consistent tools
- Rockwell's FactoryTalk software suite, providing graphically rich, role-based production data; remote access to real-time and historical time-series data from all equipment and data sources in the plant; and intuitive production dashboards that show the factors contributing to operational performance
- Bachelor Controls Inc., a Solution Partner within the Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork™ program, designed and delivered the solution
Inside the Project
What the Customer Said
BCI put a lot of emphasis on front-end design and forced me to be a better customer. They made us work hard to answer important questions up front so they could provide a return that was closer to what we actually wanted versus what we started with.
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