Nobody is perfect, so it’s a fact of life that mistakes will happen from time to time. The problem is that mistakes can be costly, especially at Chivas Brothers Ltd., a 1500-employee Scotch whisky and premium gin producer based in Paisley, Scotland. “If, for example, we were to put three-year-old whisky into a vat of 30 year-old whisky, then we couldn’t sell it as 30 years old anymore,” explains Stuart Banks, lead control engineer at the Chivas Brothers’ Kilmalid facility in Dumbarton about 20 miles outside Glasgow. “It all becomes three years old, and we’ve lost 27 years of maturation.”

Because mistakes like this can cost Chivas Brothers a lot of money, operators must follow strict procedural guidelines to maintain the integrity of the company’s premium products. For this reason, the Kilmalid bottling and blending site has been among the ranks of facilities relying on workflow-instruction technology, a form of automation that “digitizes” procedures in a workflow. Using these encoded procedures, workflow software then prompts operators, guiding them through standard operating procedures (SOPs), verifying their compliance, and checking for mistakes.

At Kilmalid, operators rely on help from an application called FactoryTalk ProductionCentre software from Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation. Blending a 50,000-liter batch of Ballantine’s whisky, for example, begins with entering the brand, quantity, and the final alcohol content. Based upon the master recipe, the software then computes the ratio of high-strength malt whisky, high-strength grain whisky, and demineralized water that will be necessary to reach the target quantity and strength.

Communicating with the programmable logic controllers (PLCs), ProductionCentre performs a number of checks throughout the process. For example, it permits the operators to choose or type only valid values for the blend being processed. It verifies that the right quantities of the appropriate spirits are going into the vat. “It also ensures that there is enough space in the vessel receiving the spirits and water,” notes Banks.

Having the latest generation of workflow-instruction technology makes it easier for the operators to uphold the company’s quality and safety standards. Before Banks and his colleagues installed Rockwell Automation’s ProductionCentre, Kilmalid was using an old MS-DOS-based system. The upgrade helped in consolidating the hardware in the control room into just one set.

The upgraded software also shrinks the time that it takes to modify the system to accommodate new equipment or new blends. “With our old system, changes would have taken considerably longer because we had to go to the third party,” says Banks. “The system that we have now makes it easy for administrators like myself to integrate changes into our site fairly quickly.” Duplicating software for an existing process from another site to run on the equipment at Kilmalid can take less than a day.

A range of options

ProductionCentre is manufacturing execution system (MES) software—which is often the first tool that comes to mind when people think of workflow instructions. But, the technology actually comes in a variety of forms and can be as simple as instructions given to an operator through a human-machine interface (HMI) connected to a PLC.
“Using a PanelView type interface and some logic in the controller, you can create a simple workflow tool that doesn’t cost a lot of money,” says Mike Gay, consumer packaged goods industry manager at Rockwell Automation. Before the days of MESs and the concept of automated workflow evolved, Gay used to do some scripting in an HMI to create his own workflow engine.

Over the past few years, automation vendors have incorporated basic workflow tools into their products. Gay says Rockwell Automation offers tools for its software at the HMI, batch and MES levels and “we’ve dabbled with workflow in the cloud.” So far, it [cloud computing] doesn’t fit manufacturing very well because the Internet is not reliable enough for real-time computing, he says.

For this reason, Gay does not consider cloud computing to be the most important innovation in workflow-instruction technology for the plant floor to have emerged over the past five years or so. Instead, he gives that honor to the modular, industry-specific workflow software tools that exist today for pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods and other industries. “The first workflow tools required a lot of customization and were very expensive to deploy and maintain,” he explains. “We suppliers have used the knowledge that we’ve collected over the years to create solutions that are 80 percent out of the box.” Because the amount of customization is much less, deployments are not only cheaper than in the past, but also much ...