- Aging equipment components
- Increasing product end-of-life failures
- Unplanned downtime
- Negative upstream impacts
- Discontinued product plans limit future availability
- Proactive plant modernization program
- Rockwell Automaton product pricing and service support incentives
- PowerFlex® 525 AC Drives upgrade
- Significant financial and time savings
- Ease of installation
- New product features and functions
From food and beverage to personal care, the demand for single-serve packaging continues to grow. As it does, one North American beverage leader continues to invest in its production capabilities and facilities including one of its largest single-serve container manufacturing sites.
“We’re a highly automated 500,000-square-foot facility,” explained a senior automation controls engineer with the plant. “We’re mostly standardized on Rockwell Automation. From ControlLogix® and CompactLogix™ controls to Kinetix® Servo Drives and PowerFlex® VFDs, almost all of our equipment and major components are Allen-Bradley® products from the Rockwell Automation catalog.”
Challenge
Aging Equipment & Components Leads to Unplanned Downtime
But after 16 years, many of the plant’s machines and components have reached obsolescence.
“I pulled out one of our PowerFlex® 40 AC Drives and it had 70,000 hours on it. Whether it’s age, heat like we have here in the south, or other factors, electronics in a plant environment don’t last forever,” the engineer said. “Every single piece of equipment we have here has a version of the PowerFlex 40 Drives, including our palletizers, case packers and even some of our building equipment.”
He estimates the plant has about 650 of these older drives, which have increasingly started to fail. Oftentimes, powering down to replace one drive has caused a domino effect of additional failures.
“With reactive downtime, we lose more than just the downtime on the equipment. We lose downtime in other departments that are dependent on that equipment,” the controls engineer explained. “Upstream departments will over produce, and it just ends up being a huge headache for us more than just what we're not producing at any given moment. We realized this is going to hurt us until we get a solution.”
Solution
Proactive Modernization Program
That’s why this facility, with the support of its Rockwell Automaton distributor Kendall Electric, started a plant modernization effort in 2019 that included replacing all PowerFlex 40 drives with the newer PowerFlex® 525 AC Drives. These next generation drives feature an innovative, modular design to support fast and easy installation and configuration, along with increased functionality.
The plant has also been able to take advantage of a Rockwell Automation drives migration program. Available in North America, the program provides product and service support incentives that help end users upgrade aging motor, motion and micro control technologies. For every five drives purchased, customers may receive a sixth free, and for eligible projects, field service support may be included.
Result
Increased Functionality, Significant Financial and Time Savings
“The migration program was a big factor in our decision making, especially since we were purchasing 650 drives,” the controls engineer said. “It provides us with significant financial savings that we’re able to reinvest back into the project. We’re able to purchase and undertake the project in two stages instead of three, which will allow us to complete the upgrade sooner.”
The plant finished its first stage of upgrades in 2020. So far, it’s installed about 400 new drives and will finish installing the second stage this year. The controls engineer cited several benefits from the proactive modernization and migration to the latest versions of a product.
“We’ve been thrilled with the reliability of the PowerFlex 525 drives. It’s a whole lot easier to install and program in the beginning and plan when equipment downtime happens,” he said. “One of the biggest benefits of modernization is the ability to take advantage of new features that come with the various Rockwell Automation products that we’re upgrading.”
That includes automatic device configuration (ADC) which simplifies drive, replacement and commissioning of a replaced drive. All of which reduces downtime. With ADC, users configure their Logix control system to set the drive’s IP address automatically, then download and install the drive’s firmware and configuration.
“For our technicians, it's just a matter of identifying a failure and then replacing the drive. Then their job is done, and automation takes care of the rest of it. There are no parameters to track down or punch in.
The PLC’s control all of that and set it up,” the controls engineer explained. “It takes out a tremendous amount of guesswork and has been a huge time savings for us. It’s about as close to plug and play as you can possibly get.”
Depending on the equipment and circumstances, he estimates ADC has saved between 60 and 90 minutes per drive replacement. He credits the plant’s relationship with Kendall Electric for suggesting KDP would benefit from ADC and the overall success to date of the drive migration.
“The absolute number one piece of advice I would give is to rely on the technical people from Rockwell Automation and their distributors,” the controls engineer said. “Having Kendall truly understand our plant applications and the capabilities of some of the newer pieces of equipment so they could be able to tell us ‘These are features you may be interested in,’ played a huge role in our migration.”
Once the plant finishes its PowerFlex drive migration, it will focus on upgrading its Kinetix Servo Drives. This migration will also be eligible for product and support incentives.
“We have close to 850 of those that we’re going to replace,” the controls engineer noted. “We’ll be very busy the next couple of years.”
Published September 3, 2024
