[Manufacturing] - Connectivity solutions of HMS Networks for an Australian F&B company – Dairyworks

Dairyworks source high quality, bulk cheese and butter from local South Island suppliers and package it into consumer products for supermarkets, convenience stores and other retail outlets throughout New Zealand and Australia.

Dairyworks acquire the weight data for reports in real time from a numbers of checkweighers in throughout the factory. Some applications required local PLCs to know product weights for process indication and control. Dairyworks use the Modicon M340 PLC for automation and data control.

This unit is, a powerful and versatile PLC however did not have native support for the ASCII protocol over Ethernet TCP/IP.

Dairyworks solution was to use an eWON 500 to get weight data from all of the checkweighers over the Ethernet TCP/IP connection. We used the eWon script to control/report status of data connections, receive and reformat weight data, tag and store in eWON memory.

The PLC, using Modbus TCP, reads and writes to the eWON memory to get the data it needs and control and test data connections.

The solution is simple, rather inexpensive and has proved reliable. It allows data to be shared on PLCs and HMIs allowing the operators live access to meaningful graphically presented production data.