Scada package saves energy in food manufacture

A Siemens Automation and Drives product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jun 16, 2003

Campbell's Grocery Products has taken energy usage extremely seriously, and has installed a system to monitor utility consumption across five centres at its Worksop site.

Although the Climate Change Levy (CCL) came as a shock to many businesses, a limited range of energy-intensive industries were granted an 80% discount from the levy in return for accepting challenging targets for improving their energy efficiency.

One of these climate change agreements is with the food and drink industry.

Campbell's Grocery Products (Worksop) has taken energy usage extremely seriously, employing an Energy Manager to monitor the consumption of gas, electricity, water, steam and compressed air, with a view to making savings through reduced wastage and improved efficiency.

But modern food manufacturing is highly complex, and so Campbell's needed a system to monitor utility consumption across five centres at its Worksop site, and with the capability to monitor specific production zones or discrete items of equipment.

Campbell's asked Industrial Control Solutions (ICS) to investigate what the best approach might be and, following a review of the alternatives available, ICS recommended the Siemens Simatic WinCC Scada package.

Steve McDermott, the Business Development Manager at ICS, explains why: "Compared with other Scada packages or dedicated energy management packages, WinCC was far more flexible.

But one of the main attractions of WinCC was the way the web navigator is seamlessly integrated; other Scada packages would have required a bolt-on Internet publishing tool.

The advantage of the web navigator is that it enables users to access the system from anywhere on site via the intranet".

McDermott continues: "WinCC is unusual in that it requires no PLCs; instead the remote meters use a radio connection and then DDE (dynamic data exchange) links to add the data to the relational database on the system's hard disc.

A further benefit of WinCC is that our experience has shown that it is far better at handling the DDE links than other packages.

Something else that we provided is a facility for users to input additional data via Excel spreadsheets.

This means that they only have to work with software they are familiar with, and they don't need to learn to use the Scada package.

However, the WinCC's reporting function is excellent for automatically delivering customised reports".

Another useful feature is the way that the users can see on-screen replicas of the meter displays.

This provides a means of verifying that the system is functioning correctly - simply by comparing values read from the on-screen meter and the actual meter.

Mick Blackburn, Campbell's Energy Manager, highlights the benefits of the WinCC system: "On the one hand it helps us to comply with the industry requirements for metering and targeting, and on the other hand it has helped us to achieve a massive six-figure financial saving over the last three years.

Bearing in mind that the project cost was GBP 70,000 overall, the payback period was much less than one year".

Reducing energy consumption is not a one-off activity, so Blackburn is still overseeing further improvements, some of which may require expansion of the WinCC system.

"Each of the five centres has an energy champion who receives daily, weekly and monthly reports.

Our target is to continue to make savings of 3% year-on-year, so the pressure is on the energy champions to seek more improvements.

In some cases this might be as simple as encouraging people to switch off lights, but we could also install additional meters on items of equipment that are heavy consumers so that we can justify making further investments".

Looking ahead, Blackburn says that the WinCC system places Campbell's in a strong position to face new challenges: "In 2005 the food industry will see the introduction of the European Integrated Pollution Control Certificate (IPCC), for which monitoring and reporting will be invaluable.

The versatility of WinCC, both in terms of being able to expand the metering and generate new reports, is excellent.

I believe that purchasing the system has been a very worthwhile investment that will pay for itself many, many times over".