MAPS Solutions in Food and Beverage

Golden Macadamia Nuts

Golden Macadamias is a traditional company, with a unique approach that combines active involvement from leading macadamia farmers with a forward-thinking focus on quality and the consumer. As part of their ethos, all of their shareholders are high-quality macadamia farmers. They currently have a  state-of-the-art production facility, with an annual capacity of 6000 tons dry-in-shell. Quality control is at the heart of their cultivation production process.Their customers are amongst the largest nut processors and users in the world.

Golden macadamia approached Adroit to replace the existing Rockwell RSView32 SCADA with an MAPS system, enabling the system to communicate to various PLC systems. The project entailed the re-engineering of the existing graphics to the MAPS system as well as to do the engineering for a extra drying room that was added to accommodate the growing delivery of the product from the farmers.

Cadbury

Cadbury’s Limited has grown to one of the worlds largest international producers of chocolate by combining sophisticated technology with the highest standards of quality, technical skills and innovation. Cadbury’s Port Elizabeth launched Project Olympus, an undertaking to build a world-class chocolate manufacturing plant incorporating state-of-the-art facilities and best practices in manufacturing and production.

To monitor and control this South African flagship, Cadbury’s chose to completely integrate the plant using technologically advanced 32-bit, open automation MAPS SCADA system. The MAPS SCADA provides a window into this largely unmanned plant, which sports three stories of production processes interspersed with an additional three mezzanine levels. Labour is only utilised at the beginning of the process for product loading and towards the end where sampling occurs for quality assurance purposes.

Klawer Winery

Nestled in a valley, between the towns of Clanwilliam and Vredendal lies the small farming community of Klawer. Winemaking in the area with its rich soils and south-facing slopes that receives a cool nightly breeze from the nearby Atlantic Ocean, is a tradition that Klawer Wine Cellar continues with pride. Ana-Digi Systems and Adroit Technologies teamed up for the Klawer project in 2005 to ensure that Klawer remains one of the major players in Cape Town as a leading producer of quality wines.

Klawer required a no-nonsense, easy to use, reliable solution for their wine tank control system and required world class support and back-up, as it was vitally important to the client who felt a bit vulnerable, due to past experience with poor services. Klawer is situated in the southern part of Namaqualand, 260 km from Cape Town. Ana-Digi assured the client of their complete support, a promise which they have kept to this day

Umbhaba Estates

Adroit recently started a project with a well known large agricultural enterprise in Mpumalanga, South Africa that supplies around 15% of the South African market with bananas. The total SA banana market is approximately 250 000 tons annually based on an average of 25 tons per hectare with 10 thousand hectares presently under banana plantations. The estate has had a significant impact on the regional socio-economic conditions and is a large-scale employer in the agricultural sector in Mpumalanga.

When looking for a SCADA solution they turned to Adroit Technologies to fulfill their monitoring and control system needs.  Using the implemented MAPS system and the MAPS Notify and Command Agent they now have alarms at each plant house and should any disturbances occur, the associated farm manager would be notified immediately via sms.

Kagera Sugar

Located in the North-Western part of Tanzania (close to the Tanzania-Uganda border) was offered for privatization by the Government of Tanzania in December 2001. Since then, KSL became another member in the Super Group of Companies. Sugarcane growing and sugar production are KSL’s main activities. KSL takes advantage of its geographical location along River Kagera, using it as a source of water in their irrigation scheme. KSL has heavily invested on the Centre Pivot Irrigation System, use of high-tech Reel Irrigators as well as Overhead Sprinklers

The plant has a total of about 8,000 tags and 3,500 scanned I/O. Approximately 80 PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) controllers with associated tuning parameters / trends are monitored by the MAPS system. Trending is used extensively in the plant system. Operators view trends per plant area and this data is used for control adjustments. Printers are installed at each of the three control rooms specifically for generating event and trend printouts.

Kraft Foods SA

Kraft Foods faced a huge challenge when moving to their new premises in Ekurhuleni east of Johannesburg. The machine producing gel sweets, such as jelly babies, needed to be moved and upgraded to ensure that demand could be met and that there was not a shift in client purchasing as a result of engineering delays.

Adroit started the project by identifying various temperatures, process times, pressures and pump speeds as the main control points in the process.  They were convinced that most of the waste related production loses could be eliminated if these critical processes were controlled within certain limits.  The standard MAPS SCADA version 5.0 with Recipe Manager was used on a stand-alone Windows XP based system.