Brewery guards against obsolescence

Paul Boughton
FMA Process Engineering, the Lichfield, UK-based project management, process control and solutions integration specialists, has completed a major control system upgrade at Molson Coors Burton-on-Trent brewery.

With an ongoing commitment to ensuring correct corporate governance across all its breweries – a policy designed to make certain that its business remains robust and even the slightest risks to process and production are eliminated – Molson Coors selected FMA in light of their long pedigree of providing the brewer with well-proven, highly robust solutions.

Operating both iFIX and Setcim SCADA systems at the Burton brewery, Molson Coors required FMA to standardise their operations by bringing all Setcim procedures within the brewery’s iFIX SCADA environment.

In addition to ensuring ongoing support of the brewery control system and simplifying maintenance by moving to one SCADA solution, the switch to iFIX was also designed to simplify the introduction of new processes and recipes.

Reverse engineering the existing Setcim SCADA into Molson Coors’ iFIX environment, FMA converted in the region of 200 command pages, controlling such areas as bright beer tanks, filtration lines, yeast propagation and the main routing station to the packaging facilities. As an additional element of the project, FMA also carried out a PLC conversion from Allen Bradley 5250 to Controllogix.

By common consent, FMA's handling of the project exceeded all expectations. As Molson Coors Manufacturing Business Systems Manager Mick Holden confirms: "Our Right Way to Upgrade" strategy provides very strict guidelines and FMA's adherence to those guidelines is testament to the company's, experience, professionalism and detailed understanding of our corporate needs. As a result, process and production levels were robustly protected throughout the upgrade procedure".

For more information, visit www.fmm.uk.com

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